Toyota

As I've said previously, I am a Toyota owner. So far, at least, my model and year has not been among those named in any of the recalls or otherwise been mentioned as having a problem. And I have no anxieties or concerns as to whether I'm safe while driving my car. (Even if my car were one of the "problem" models, statistics would still be on my side: that is, the problems so far have manifested themselves in only a small percentage of the cars of a certain model. It's kind of like how you expect the odds to be in your favor when you board an airplane.)

Nevertheless, if I were an owner of a model affected by one of the problems that we've been hearing about, I would feel that Toyota has betrayed the trust of its customers. Our loyalty, our esteem for its products—and here I think can include myself—seems to have been misplaced.

That my model is not being recalled and presumably does not have one of the problems (acceleration, brakes, steering) does not mean that I am totally unaffected by all the averse news involving Toyota cars, however. A few days ago it was announced that Kelly Blue Book was lowering its values for Toyotas: that is, the worth that they specify for cars as trade-ins or for sale on the used-car market. And the Blue Book is a highly respected authority on the value of used cars.

The acceleration problem with certain Toyota models at one point was being ascribed to the fact that the "gas pedal" on these cars is not a simple, mechanical link to the engine throttle, but actually an electronic control that works on the engine through the car's computer. And now, newer Toyota Corollas are said to have a fault with their steering, and again it's not a problem with old-fashioned, simple mechanical parts but, again, Toyota has switched to electrically-controlled steering.

Maybe simpler is better, and these new, more sophisticated and more complicated electrical controls are not a good idea. Cars are getting so sophisticated and so complicated. Anyone who used to work on his own car, doing tune-ups and so forth, has found that, over the decades, that has become almost impossible. You need electronic instruments to work on modern cars, at least to diagnose their problems. (Plus, for reasons best known to the manufacturers, modern cars are also impossible to work on because nothing is accessible anymore. As an example, it used to be so easy to check or replace the air filter. It was a matter of loosening a wing nut with your fingers, or on later models, flipping a clamp. Not any more: the air filter housing is fastened with bolts. and it takes a socket wrench to remove those bolts. Why these changes? It must be to discourage the owner from performing this task himself and thus to make more money for the dealers.)

Older, mechanical car parts might be subject to wear and corrosion and so on; but the new ones are subject to errors in computer programs. To put it very non-technically, computers can mess up big-time, maybe creating worse consequences than the simple wear of a mechanical part would cause.

Also, our government is mandating more and more electronic controls on cars. A lot of the electronics and computer controls originally came into use to help car engines meet government-mandated emissions limits. (I'm not implying that these emissions standards are a bad thing.) The latest is that all cars must have Vehicle Stability Control, which helps keep drivers from giving bad driving inputs to their cars that might send the cars out of control. Basically, the car knows better than you do, how it should be driven.

One concern I have about that is that there are a lot of cute, economical, and fun-to-drive little European cars that I'd like to see sold in the U.S. so that drivers who want to drive something economical would have more choice. But manufacturers have some terrible hurdles that they must clear in order to import their cars, including the cost of adding all the features that the U.S. government says a car must have before it can be sold here.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein