Again and Again and Again

Are some lessons too hard to learn? What is your take on the Toyota sticking pedal recall? It is like watching a car crash in slow motion as you watch the company go through all the predictable stages - deny, conceal, admit in part, mount legal defence, watch sales fall through the floor. It is not as if we have not been here before. The big US example before Toyota was Volkswagen US. They too had a problem with sudden and uncontrollable acceleration. VW is an engineering-led company and the first reaction was to blame the US driver who could not manage the thorough-bred Audi model that was involved in most of the problems. Well it did not work and for a long time, you could not give away Audis in the US market.

My take is that the warranty or aftersales department still has less clout than legal, finance and insurance departments. The bean counters leap in to limit the financial damage and while there may be quality control action, the data is sparse and difficult to interpret but hey it is only a few people. A silent recall may be in order but let us keep the lid on this. After all, the rationale continues, the last thing we want to do is to panic customers. The upshot of all this is that the company leaves it to someone else to panic the customer - a sharp lawyer working with a journalist or two, a quote from a legislator or the head of a government safety agency and bang the report on CNN and it all goes global. The company then suffers a degree of market damage and financial loss that dwarfs the expense of pre-emptive recall and settlements with customers who feel at risk.

Have any SOCAPiE members had personal experience of this sort of thing either as a consumer or as a customer service professional? Tell us your views.