Jokes, usually in questionable taste, are what really do it for car companies.
Some are surprisingly durable. The lines that FIAT stands for “Fix It Again, Tony” or that Lotus means “Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious” can be carbon-dated to the 1970s.
As it happens, the expected global wave of Toyota gags doesn’t seem to have materialised, yet, though a “Toyotathon of Death” has featured on America’s Daily Show with John Stewart, where Stewart also excitedly screams at Detroit: “Hey boys, we’re back in the game – thanks to our rival making death traps”.
My own attempt at humour is based on a Toyota advertising slogan of a few years ago: “The car in front is no longer a Toyota – even if it doesn’t want to be”.
So there you go. Embarrassing, but not as bad as it might be. The reputational damage Toyota has suffered ought, for example, to be nothing like the scale of shame that Skoda and its drivers (like me, I have to confess) endured for decades.
The Skoda story – and accompanying jokes – must make Toyota’s marketeers wince. A decade and a half ago the old Communist outfit churned out shoddy, and, on a wet corner, dangerously handling cars, probably far more life-threatening than anything Toyota may have perpetrated. Belfast Telegraph
In the wake of a bailout of Detroit’s ailing manufacturing industry last year the US government owns a 60% stake in GM and has a minority holding in Chrysler.
This leaves it with an apparent conflict of interest as it stands in judgment over a foreign rival.
The US transport secretary, Ray LaHood, has come under fire for over-reacting to Toyota’s difficulty – he was obliged to perform a swift U-turn on Wednesday after initially advising owners to stop driving all of the 8.1m v¬ehicles affected by the global recall.
David Champion, director of automobile testing for Consumer Reports magazine, said the core problem of faulty Toyota accelerators had been linked to 19 deaths in a decade, amounting to two a year of the 40,000 people killed annually on ¬American roads.
“I find it a little odd that we’re going to have a Congressional hearing to look at those two deaths out of 40,000,” said Champion.
“Any death is tragic but you have to look at death rates in safety terms rationally.” The Guardian
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Toyotathon of Death - Unintended Acceleration Problem | ||||
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