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Toyota questions runaway Prius story
Toyota Prius hybrid model cars at a Toyota dealer in Hollywood, Calif.
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Kai Ryssdal: Toyota has clearly decided enough's enough with all the recent reports of unintended acceleration in its hybrid Priuses. The company held a press conference today to say nobody's been able to re-create the incident from San Diego last week. The one where the highway patrol had to pull in front to help slow it down.
Some analysts are saying it's about time the company started getting control of this story. And reassuring its customers.
Marketplace's Alisa Roth explains that can be a tricky balance.
ALISA ROTH: Toyota's critics say that since this crisis began, the company hasn't missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It took too long to respond to concerns about the recalls. And when it finally did respond, it said all the wrong things.
David Margulies is a public relations expert. He says it seems like Toyota's finally getting ahead of the story.
DAVID MARGULIES: You can certainly point to things that are not true or don't seem to address the issue and that way you're being proactive. You're out doing something. You're not hiding in a bunker somewhere. And that's what people want to see.
In a lot of ways, this is really a perception issue. Only a few Toyotas have had problems. But that's not the way the public sees it. Toyota's enormous challenge now is to convince people its cars are safe to drive.
David Boule is at PCGCampbell, it's a marketing and communications firm that specializes in the auto industry. He says if last week's incident with the runaway Prius turns out to be a hoax, it could be a good opportunity for Toyota. But the company will still have to handle it carefully.
DAVID BOULE: They still have to be very cautious about being perceived as cavalier or uncaring, that they're not taking all of this responsibly and doing the right thing.
He says it's like Toyota's driving a narrow mountain road. It has to defend itself, without sounding defensive.
BOULE: They have some wind at their back now, and they have some third-party endorsers, so it's not just their investigation.
At the press conference today, Toyota said preliminary findings were inconsistent with the driver's account. And that there should be a further investigation into that driver's story.
I'm Alisa Roth for Marketplace.
While I think that Toyota (an other manufacturers) must take these types of issues very seriously, I am frustrated that there seems to be an attitude that this issue is about making our roads safer. NHTSA and safety advocates are calling for additional regulation that will only result in more expensive cars and a negligible improvement in safety. The fact remains that driver error causes 95% of accidents. If we want safer roads, we need to demand safer drivers: http://wp.me/pGyRI-8y
The one thing I am curious about is not whether Toyota or the NHTSA can replicate this problem (if it is one) on the Prius. What I am curious about is that some news articles say it is not possible to be accelerating and breaking at the same time in a Prius. The electronics just would not permit it.
If this is true, the question Toyota must answer is how did the police officer find this car going 94 mph, and with smoking brakes (the secondary system, I understand)?
It would be interesting to see if someexpert out there could replicate a Prius going that fast and having smoking breaks at the same time?! Some sequence of accelerating and braking perhaps?
I wouldn’t put a great deal of emphasis on Toyota’s “We can’t recreate itâ€, even though it’s probably true.
When I worked in the auto module industry we often had events that we “couldn’t recreate†in the short term. Some of the events were never solved. One I remember involved a module logging a code during final test at the assembly line. Maybe one vehicle in a thousand would do it. We would send engineers to the plant where the subject vehicle was pulled off the line for failure diagnosis. We spent innumerable hours trying to recreate the event without success. Fortunately, the problem wasn’t safety related. Another problem did not set a code and only occurred in very cold weather. It was a non-safety-related problem and took months to solve.
My present vehicle (not a Toyota) has two intermittent problems, one of fairly recent onset the other of several years running. The older problem is that the horn will sometimes sound when I am not pressing the horn activator. It’s just one brief “toot†and has occurred maybe five times in six years. The second fault is that occasionally the doors will lock without my doing anything; I don’t use the key or press “Lock†on the fob. I turn off the ignition, get out of the car, and close the door, and when I come back – thirty seconds to a couple minutes later – the doors are locked. Fortunately, I carry a spare key at all times. Fortunately, neither of these falts is safety-related. Dimes will get you donuts that neither the dealer nor a factory engineer would be “able to recreate†these faults in a couple days.
The point is that Toyota’s “acceleration†problem id safety-related and they need to attack it as real and find work-arounds until they can locate it. They should be showing that they are testing hundreds of vehicles with modules that have been taken from vehicles whose owners have reported the problem.
