[QUOTE=SW17LS;11737184]Toyota as a company is just nothing like they once were. No longer driven by a desire to build the best car and do it right where shame of failure or mistake was so personal to their leaders and workers. Really a shame.[quote]

From what I can tell, that started around 2000 or so, and has been the case for about a quarter-century. But, in the 80s and 90s, Toyota and Honda wrote the book on build-quality among lower-priced vehicles, and, before the mid-to-late 1990s, Mercedes probably did the best job among premium/luxury-nameplates.

There are already signs that the EV may reaching a peak and will soon decline.

https://ssti.us/2023/05/15/electric-...ed-for-a-peak/

This D.C. area has vast amounts of money to spend on new vehicles (and it shows)......arguably second only to Southern California. But vast parts of the country, between the two coasts, don't.

Common sense has to also be used when making regulations. If you pile too many of them on, too quickly, without adequate resources, it can overwhelm the ability of companies to respond.

I may be wrong, but, unlike me, I'd wager you are not quite old enough to remember or live through that happened in the early 1970s, here in the American vehicle-market, when the massive (for that time) safety, pollution, and CAFE regulations all hit more or less at once....although the first real legislation dates to 1966-1968. So much time, effort, and money went into trying to meet all the demands at once that build-quality tanked, interior materials cheapened to the point of dime-store quality (although Brougham-seats became common in upmarket vehicles in the later part of the decade), carburated engines would barely start and run at all, often stalling, because they were so heavily-choked, and vehicles, particularly from Chrysler, came off the assembly lines literally half-assembled with parts falling off, screws falling out, and rattles/squeaks all over. Although some engineering improvements helped (EFI, electronic engine controls, clearcoat paint, etc...), the American companies did not truly recover from that, at least IMO, until about 10-15 years ago.



My point, though, was that one cannot run a business without some debt. Materials, labor, taxes, utilities, transportation, liability/insirance, etc.....all of that costs money. The real question, obviously, is how well one can pay it off and still remain IN business. Even short-term profits have to be re-invested if one is to keep up wth future needs.

 

The EV market has not peaked and will not decline lol. EVs are the future, like it or not.

 

So you are OK @mmarshall with having no regulations when it comes to safety, do I understand you correctly? If so, there are a lot countries I've travelled to you would love that have ZERO crash regulations. Zero seat belt regulations. Zero Smog regulations. Zero air quality regulations. Zero almost any regulations. Of course people die of lung diseases, minor car crashes and even when they drink the water. But hey, you'll save a lot of money

 

Denial. Its great way to escape reality 🤣🤣

 

Yet, Toyota and other Japanese automakers were able to meet all of those regulations.

Um, yes you can. Many businesses including mine operate with no debt. More huge companies than you think too. If they have debt, you want to see cash on hand in excess of that debt.

Toyota is currently the most indebted company in the world. $186B in debt

 

No, you don't read me correctly. I never said I was against regs...in fact, I agree with a number of them. But, IMO, they can reach a level that it becomes burdensome for manufacturers, there is temptation to cheat (A.K.A. Dieselgate), and you reach a point of diminishing returns.

 

Temptation to cheat doesn't excuse cheating lol

 

That's why I asked. Every automaker has to face the same safety regulations, it's not unfairly doled on one and not the other. Regardless if they are burdensome, I want to know as a consumer that my family and I will be safe in the event of an accident, minor or otherwise and this just removes my confidence in Toyota. And I would treat any automaker this way, for example if I thought my Model Y was unsafe in anyway, I would have never bought it, regardless how well it performs

 

yeah generally MMarshall is more regulation friendly than most of the server.

 

Well, we all follow regulations right here in CL, including you and me....but those regulations are not overwhelming.

 

So, what's your idea of "safe"? No matter how many regulations you have, there is no such thing as a totally injury-proof or death-proof vehicle. In the end, safety depends more on one thing than anything else........your paying attention and using good judgement as a driver.

And I learned that even more in aviation, in the cockpit, where you have to monitor a LOT more things than just staring out the front of the plane's windshield.

 

What you've done here is moved the goalpost. I think you know exactly what I mean. Any sane person knows if someone hits you at 100 mph we are all dead. But what if the impact is 30 or 40 mph? If a manufacturer says a vehicle can handle an impact at x miles per hour, than it better damn well protect my family at those speeds.

No matter how you spin it, Akio didn't bow down low enough in his apology to satisfy me

 

I don't disagree but this is far from Toyota's first major public vehicle safety scandal and at that time they were in their prime. In fact the safety issue at hand in the OP stems back to their cars made since the 1980's.

Rather than a commentary on Toyota itself, I think this is a reflection of how much goodwill the public has to the brand that they can forgive and forget something that would usually destroy most other company's reputations like what happened to Audi in the 1990's with the exact same unintended acceleration scandal. Whether Toyota deserves such nearly blind goodwill is another question entirely, when the reality is that Toyota is no different from any other corporation and has never been the "Good Samaritan" the public pretends it is as demonstrated by their prior scandals.

 

No, I didn't move any goalposts....they were never solidly anchored in the first place.

There are all kinds of different impacts at 30-40 MPH. NHTSA and the IIHS generally use standardized tests with head-on and front-corner impacts into specially-designed ram-barriers, but that only covers a small percentage of the possible ways that accidents can actually happen.

Well, that's your own business, and between you and him....I won't get involved in that. I'm looking at it from a practical and pragmatic side.

 

You just said you didn't move any goal posts, but at the same time admitted they are moveable When it comes to safety, there can be no moveable goal posts, IMO.

I have no business between myself and the chairman, in fact I actually really don't care about their cheating, I sounded a little grumpy because it was way past my bedtime, and really one shouldn't post when they are grumpy and tired . Toyota lost me as a customer way before this scandal. They don't offer anything that appeals to me, and Chairman Akio's biggest crime is holding Toyota back from progress and following the path of GM in the 90's. I can say with surety that Toyota offers some of the most boring cars out there. The only vehicles that appeal to me are the LC500, IS500, IS350, but none of those are practical, are going away soon, and if I was to go back to ICE, I would probably be leasing BMW's, driving an M3 or M4 Competition. But that's has nothing to do with this Toyota scandal, so I'll move on