The financial press this morning reported Toyota’s current problems in USA where they have halted production and made a massive recall of vehicles due to an accelerator problem is the door Ford & GM need to overtake Toyota again. The press are missing a couple of critical points. Firstly this issue has brought to the fore a fundamental part of Toyota’s DNA, that of stopping production until problems are solved.

Toyota dealers seem to be handling the obviously large number of calls from customers concerned about the safety of their vehicle and unfortunately at this precise moment they don’t have an answer or solution to the issue - YET.? Exposing yet another part of Toyota’s DNA - that of not moving forward until they have the solution. Not a patch to get them out of trouble but THE solution to the issue. Customers can breath easily in the knowledge that the solution will be the right one.

Ford and GM may in the short term get a few extra sales due to this issue - however they don’t seem to get the long term view Toyota takes. This problem could actually be the launching pad for a stronger Toyota in the near future. My prediction is that those customers that move away from owning a Toyota and back to a Ford or General Motors vehicle will be back in a flash after they have had an opportunity to truly compare the competitive product and then realise how far ahead the Toyota product really is. And once these customers have come back - Toyota will have them for ever.

Beware the wounded !!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.