What is Toyota doing to shore up falling quality levels?

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Toyota has been synonymous with quality, so much so that it was Toyota’s enduring faith in quality, which propelled it to the world’s top car maker position way back in 2008. After this milestone though, things haven’t looked all that rosy for Toyota, which has been struggling to salvage it’s reputation of high quality and reliability, as it has been tainted by a string of recalls totaling to more than a few million Toyotas, mainly in the United states of America.

What followed was a rash of lawsuits and congressional hearings along with consumers expressing outrage and anger over deaths which they believe could have been prevented if Toyota had acted quick enough. Better late than later, Toyota issued an unconditional apology along with recalling millions of it’s affected cars. Fast forward, the world is wondering what Toyota is doing to redeem itself as a maker of high quality and ultra reliable passenger cars. Hence, we thought it would be fair on our part to highlight the measures that the beleaguered Japanese automaker is taking in a bid to make sure that it doesn’t repeat the quality mistakes of the past.

First of all, no less a personality than Akio Toyoda, the president and CEO of Toyota Corp will head the all important, special committee for global quality. This move, while ensuring a compliance of Toyota’s quality levels is also symbolic of Toyota dedicating it’s very top personnel to win back the all important car buyers’ trust and faith. Secondly, Toyota has designated a new chief quality officer for each principal geographical region (including Asia / India) to help make the company more alert to customer concerns. These officers will head regional units of the newly established Special Committee for Global Quality.

Toyota is also working on a new consumer feedback mechanism which enables the car buyer to give feedback directly to its Quality Group and Product Development Group. This in a bid to ensure that information received can quickly be translated into product quality improvements. While, this new feedback mechanism will hit the US market first, Toyota will quickly replicate it in it’s other markets. Also, Toyota has add a brake override system to all future models worldwide. This system will cut engine power when the accelerator and brake pedals are applied at the same time.

From all these new developments, it isn’t too difficult to gauge that Toyota is pulling out all stops to ensure that it regains it’s crown of a car maker known for it’s high quality and impeccable reliability. While it would be very easy on our part to give Toyota bad press and condemn it for the quality fiascos of the past, we’ll cut the Japanese car maker some slack and hope that Toyota quickly gets back to where it once belonged, as a global leader and game changer in automobile quality and reliability.

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