Toyota Recall - Accelerator Pedal may get stuck [merged]

[the_jet]

To all Toyota lover, lastyear is my first toyota, an Altis i bougth at toyota bel air makati. At 1st gear, the engine pulsate, the transmission whine, and diminishes at 2nd and 3rd. Even at steady press on accelarator engine sometimes rev up to 4,000. luckyly i got a M/T.Sometime it suddenly choke down. The dealer told me GANYAN TALAGA YAN, WALA YAN SIRA . I disagree even refusing to get it from repair for a month. I wrote an Email to toyota phil. No reply. Its my last toyota.

"Ganyan talaga yan" - WTF!!! Ask for the manager & talk to him. Tell him about the problem & write a formal complaint both to him and the toyota philippines main office.
Though I don't know the address of the main office

[tidus1203]

The curse of being the world’s largest car manufacturer

February 06, 2010

Early in the 20th century, automobiles were manufactured in a tedious process. A group of workers would crowd around a single car and put it together for more than half a day. The craft was hard but meticulous. And had car-making continued at this pace, it was highly unlikely that the world would have been motorized in its entirety. Thankfully, Henry Ford perfected the concept of the assembly line.

The seamless, moving assembly line was born in 1913 at Ford’s Highland Park facility in Michigan, five years after the Model T had been introduced. The assembly line, of course, meant faster production time. It featured workers that performed the same tasks on slowly moving cars over and over again. Because a worker merely repeated a single task assigned to him (or her), he (or she) achieved the fastest possible time to finish it. Try it. Remove the lace of your shoe and put it back again. Do this a dozen times and clock yourself each time. I guarantee you that your time on your 12th try will be significantly faster than your time on your very first attempt.

Indeed, the assembly line greatly hastened the manufacture of the Model T. In 1908, when the car was launched, Ford workers took 12 hours and eight minutes to produce one unit. With the advent of the assembly line, the unit production time was drastically cut to one hour and 33 minutes. Model T units rolled off the factory so fast that the body-paint section couldn’t keep up--at the time, paints didn’t dry as fast as they do today. Only black paint had a decent drying time, prompting Ford to stop offering other colors. This is the story behind Henry Ford’s famous quote: “The Model T is available in any color you choose, so long as it is black.”

In 1914, a year after the inception of the assembly line, Ford was able to produce a total of 308,162 cars. This number was remarkable because it was more than the total of all the other carmakers in the world combined. Thanks to the assembly line, Ford practically owned the automotive market. Soon, its rivals had no choice but to adopt the same manufacturing process. It is said that those who refused to follow suit eventually went out of business.

Apart from the faster production time, the assembly line yielded another important benefit. And that was the reduction of production costs. In 1908, at the Model T’s launch, the car had a price tag of $825 (around $19,000 or P885,000 today if adjusted for inflation). Thanks again to the assembly line, the Model T would cost just $260 in 1924 ($3,300 or P154,000 after inflation). Imagine that! As a result, even Ford’s own factory workers were soon able to afford a Model T themselves--which was Henry Ford’s vision to begin with.

But Ford was forced to retire the Model T in 1927 after having produced 15,000,000 units. That was because its sales had been rapidly decreasing—understandable for a two-decade-old model. To further complicate matters, Ford had nothing to replace the Model T with, due in large part to Henry Ford’s stubborn refusal to develop a new car that would succeed his beloved Model T. He probably thought it would sell forever. Such is the first curse of being a global leader: complacency, or the unwillingness to innovate. Ford would hastily roll out the Model A, but by then Chevrolet had quickly established itself as a serious threat to Ford’s market dominance.

Since then, car companies have continuously refined the assembly line and shortened the vehicles’ development time in order to cope with global demand and also to outsell each other. Ultimately, the focus shifted on volume rather than quality. Bragging rights were earned by the carmaker that produced the most number of vehicles in a year. For the better part of the last century, that distinction went to General Motors. But as the sad fate of GM proved, just because you manufacture and sell the most number of cars doesn’t mean you’re successful. Because sooner or later, as you get more and more intoxicated with sales figures, you will begin to lose sight of the important things: innovation, customer satisfaction and high quality. All that really matters to you now is to keep churning out those cars.

This, I believe, was the major factor that did GM in. It became obsessed with market leadership, believing that market leadership rested on numbers and not consumer trust. To sell more units, the company acquired as many brands as it could. Sadly lost in all this expansion was quality control. A number of cars made by GM from the Seventies to the Nineties are now regular fixtures on any “Worst Cars Ever” list. Chevrolet Caprice and Citation, anyone?

Enter Toyota of Japan. For a carmaker that almost folded in the early Fifties, Toyota has done pretty well. It went on to expand outside its home country and develop a solid presence in the world’s most important market, America. From its launch of the luxury brand Lexus in 1989 to its introduction of the youthful Scion division in 2002, Toyota made it clear that it was out to become the biggest carmaker in the world.

While Toyota bosses didn’t want to admit it--perhaps for fear of a backlash in the US market--the goal all along had been to supplant GM as the global industry leader in terms of production volume. Toyota ultimately reached that goal in 2007, when it finally surpassed GM’s vehicle production by some 200,000 units, effectively ending its American rival’s 76-year reign as the undisputed global leader in vehicle assembly.

But now, finding itself at the top this time, Toyota apparently has compromised a few things and overlooked a couple of values that brought it to its current status in the first place, just to keep up with production demands. Those few things include bulletproof quality and an exacting attention to details. This, I believe, is where Toyota committed some of its missteps. Everyone’s favorite car company suddenly forgot its priority--which is customer satisfaction, not global market leadership.

If you’re manufacturing around nine million vehicles a year, it’s very easy to commit mistakes here and there. That’s the problem with being a giant car manufacturer. Hyundai could be headed in that direction as well if it isn’t careful. What Toyota needs to do now is to go back to the very basics--back when it knew how to treat every single car as a masterpiece. Yes, back when it didn’t care about market shares as much as it did about pleasing the customer.

If it’s any consolation to Toyota, at least it can learn from this debacle a very important moral: It’s infinitely better to manufacture few but excellent vehicles than to produce countless but mediocre ones.

Written by Vernon Sarne

http://www.topgear.com.ph/features/c...r-manufacturer

[niky]

2009 vios manual. may na pansin ba kayo kung nag shift ng transmission. pagbitaw ng accelerator pedal eh may delay. nagkakaroon ng high rev. mga ilan seconds bago bumaba. kaya habang nakaapak ako sa clutch mag antay muna ako ng few seconds bago inaapakan ang accelerator. Pero nakasanayan an natin na quick response ang pakbitaw dapat bumaba agad ang rev. feeling ko mas matakaw kumain ng fuel kung ganito. defective ba ito?

That's normal. All modern drive-by-wire cars will not shut the throttle immediately when you release the pedal. This is because the sudden closing of the throttle plate causes a momentary "rich" condition, sending unburned gasoline out of the exhaust, contributing to pollution. Modern cars keep the throttle open, revving a little bit and slowly closing it after you release the pedal, to prevent this from happening.

To all Toyota lover, lastyear is my first toyota, an Altis i bougth at toyota bel air makati. At 1st gear, the engine pulsate, the transmission whine, and diminishes at 2nd and 3rd. Even at steady press on accelarator engine sometimes rev up to 4,000. luckyly i got a M/T.Sometime it suddenly choke down. The dealer told me GANYAN TALAGA YAN, WALA YAN SIRA . I disagree even refusing to get it from repair for a month. I wrote an Email to toyota phil. No reply. Its my last toyota.

Is that a steady press while the car is in gear? If it is, then you have a sliding clutch. Which is not normal.

[renzo_d10]

This is the highlight of the story. Mr. Vernon really has a point on his last statement. It’s infinitely better to manufacture few but excellent vehicles than to produce countless but mediocre ones.

Enter Toyota of Japan. For a carmaker that almost folded in the early Fifties, Toyota has done pretty well. It went on to expand outside its home country and develop a solid presence in the world’s most important market, America. From its launch of the luxury brand Lexus in 1989 to its introduction of the youthful Scion division in 2002, Toyota made it clear that it was out to become the biggest carmaker in the world.

While Toyota bosses didn’t want to admit it--perhaps for fear of a backlash in the US market--the goal all along had been to supplant GM as the global industry leader in terms of production volume. Toyota ultimately reached that goal in 2007, when it finally surpassed GM’s vehicle production by some 200,000 units, effectively ending its American rival’s 76-year reign as the undisputed global leader in vehicle assembly.

But now, finding itself at the top this time, Toyota apparently has compromised a few things and overlooked a couple of values that brought it to its current status in the first place, just to keep up with production demands. Those few things include bulletproof quality and an exacting attention to details. This, I believe, is where Toyota committed some of its missteps. Everyone’s favorite car company suddenly forgot its priority--which is customer satisfaction, not global market leadership.

If you’re manufacturing around nine million vehicles a year, it’s very easy to commit mistakes here and there. That’s the problem with being a giant car manufacturer. Hyundai could be headed in that direction as well if it isn’t careful. What Toyota needs to do now is to go back to the very basics--back when it knew how to treat every single car as a masterpiece. Yes, back when it didn’t care about market shares as much as it did about pleasing the customer.

If it’s any consolation to Toyota, at least it can learn from this debacle a very important moral: It’s infinitely better to manufacture few but excellent vehicles than to produce countless but mediocre ones.

[tidus1203]

And Toyota now is just like GM then. I hope Hyundai learns from Toyota in their own quest to become #1. Being #1 is a noble goal but never forget the customers, they are not just numbers they are your business!

[Gumusut_Amige]

looks like more legal issues coming for toyota to answer after the recall was ordered... tagal na pala na nag umpisa ang problemang ito pero hindi binigyan pansin kaagad ng toyota management.
di malayong susunod sila sa yapak ng GM.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_toyota...oad_to_recalls

WASHINGTON – When Peter Boddeart's Lexus lurched forward and rear-ended another vehicle in Fauquier County, Va., earning him a police citation, he wrote to federal regulators imploring them to look into his case "before someone ends up seriously injured or killed."That was in 2003.

The years since have seen hundreds of drivers' complaints about unwanted acceleration of their Toyotas, six inconclusive federal investigations, multiple reports of deaths and repeated denials from the automaker that it had a major problem on its hands.That's just the sort of bureaucratic inertia Barack Obama pointedly criticized as a presidential candidate. Yet his administration was without a federal highway safety chief for most of its first year and, like the Bush administration before it, missed signals in the Toyota case. After several investigations, it was only last week that Toyota owners learned federal regulators, concerned that the company was not taking apparently dangerous defects seriously enough, traveled to Japan in December to light a fire under corporate executives. Meanwhile, millions of Toyotas continued to be driven by drivers unaware of the potential scope of the problem, and the cars continued to be sold. Combined with a recall involving the toxic metal cadmium that arose from press scrutiny rather than federal oversight, the Toyota episode has raised questions about whether the government under Democrats will be any more agile in enforcement of consumer protections than the Bush administration was.
"When you've got a government regulatory agency, it has to be a government cop on the corporate beat," said Joan Claybrook, who was chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the Carter administration. "And it's got to act like a cop."
Claybrook said that while most of the Toyota investigations took place during the Bush administration, the absence of a permanent administrator during Obama's first year prevented a new team from conducting a full review of dozens of pending defect investigations and a fresh look at the Toyota cases.
Toyota's string of recalls burst into the open in late September, leaving millions of car owners unsure if their vehicles were safe to drive and tarnishing the reputation of a company once synonymous with safe, reliable cars. The road to the recall of millions of Camrys, Corollas and other popular Toyota models began years ago, touched off by warnings from Boddeart, who died in April, and others who worried their cars might bolt forward and cause a crash.
Back in 2003, Boddeart told regulators that his accident marked the third time his 1999 Lexus LS400 accelerated unexpectedly and asked them to investigate. Five months later, the 83-year-old's petition to the agency was panned "in view of the need to allocate and prioritize NHTSA's limited resources," a common refrain in rejection letters.
Several investigations followed.
In 2004, Carol Mathews, a nurse from Rockville, Md., crashed into a tree when her Lexus suddenly accelerated. She asked the agency to investigate. The government reviewed problems with electronic throttles in about 1 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles and found more than 100 complaints.
Seeking to limit the scope of the review, Toyota urged the government to consider a "vehicle surge to be something less than a wide-open throttle." No defect was found after 4 1/2 months of investigating and the case was closed.
In July 2005, Jordan Ziprin, a retired attorney in Phoenix, asked the government to dig into the problem after his 2002 Camry XLE spun out of control and crashed into an electric utility box. "Had there been any vehicles or pedestrians in the street, deaths would probably have followed," he wrote.
Reviewing Toyota models built from 2002 to 2005, the agency found that 20 percent of 432 complaints reviewed involved "sudden or unintended acceleration." But regulators said the complaint rate was "unremarkable." The government closed the case, citing "insufficient evidence."
A separate investigation launched in March 2007 reviewed allegations that floor mats were interfering with accelerator pedals. Toyota said a month later that there was "no possibility of the pedal interference with the all-weather floor mat if it's placed properly and secured."
By that August, government investigators had tied the problem to 12 deaths and a survey of 600 Lexus owners found about 10 percent reported sudden or unexpected acceleration. In September, Toyota recalled 55,000 Camry and ES350 vehicles to replace the floor mats. But that was hardly the end of the problems.
In January 2008, William Kronholm of Helena, Mont., complained about his 2006 Tacoma truck accelerating while he hit the brakes. During the investigation, Toyota told NHTSA it believed complaints by Kronholm, a retired Associated Press editor, and others were attributed to "extensive media coverage" and many of the problems cited by consumers — including lurching when the vehicle came to a stop and engine idle speed changes when the vehicle was stopped — were "minor drivability concerns." Kronholm's case was closed in August 2008 without a defect finding.
Last August, a high-speed crash near San Diego killed a California highway patrol officer, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law, bringing renewed attention to the problems, now the regulatory responsibility of the Obama administration.
The highway patrol officer's loaner Lexus ES350 reached speeds of more than 120 mph, struck an SUV, launched off an embankment, rolled several times and burst into flames. The family frantically called 911 from the Lexus, telling the dispatcher the pedal was stuck and they couldn't stop.
In October, Toyota issued its largest-ever U.S. recall, involving about 4 million vehicles. The fix, which is still under way, includes reconfiguring the gas pedal and installing brake override software on some vehicles.
In November, Toyota said federal regulators had concluded "no defect exists" in the case, drawing a rare rebuke from the government. NHTSA said the company issued inaccurate information. In December, federal officials traveled to Japan to urge Toyota to take the safety concerns seriously and report defects promptly. Toyota said it would comply.
On Jan. 12, a top Toyota executive said the company was addressing the problems. "We have learned from these mistakes and we are confident that we're doing the right thing for our customers," Toyota Motor Sales USA president Yoshi Inaba said in a Detroit speech.
Nine days later, Toyota recalled 2.3 million vehicles over concerns that the gas pedal could get stuck or fail to return to the idle position. Dealers are now engaged in an all-out blitz to fix the vehicles, inserting a small plate into the pedal assembly to deal with friction that could cause the problem.
Separately, Toyota also told dealers Friday that it's preparing a plan to repair the brakes on thousands of hybrid Prius cars in the U.S. and would disclose details in the coming week. More than 100 drivers of 2010 Prius cars have complained that their brakes seemed to fail momentarily when they were driving on bumpy roads.
The efforts have done little to soothe critics who have long thought the highway safety agency was too trusting of car companies and slow to push for higher standards. In Toyota's case, two of the company's top safety officials in Washington are former NHTSA employees.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who exposed auto industry malfeasance in his 1960s best-seller, "Unsafe at Any Speed," said the problems stem from a "regulatory enforcement agency that turned itself, due to corporate pressure and White House neglect, into a consulting firm."
NHTSA was without a permanent administrator for most of the past year. Obama's first choice, Chuck Hurley, chief executive officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, withdrew from consideration after environmentalists criticized him for being too soft on fuel efficiency standards. It was not until December that Obama put forward David Strickland, a former counsel to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, who was confirmed.

sht 1/2

[Gumusut_Amige]

cont'n sht 2/2... (sa laki ng problema ng toyota yung 1 page hindi kinaya hehehe)

Now fully engaged, the Transportation Department has stepped up its investigation and warned that Toyota could face civil penalties of up to $16 million for failing to issue timely recalls. But the government has sent a mixed message. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood advised owners of recalled Toyota to stop driving their vehicles last week, then quickly backtracked and said he misspoke.
Congress is investigating and lawmakers are planning at least two hearings on the Toyota recalls this month. Now some Republicans, whose party was accused of failing to protect consumers during the Bush administration, question whether the agency held Toyota accountable.
"It begs the question if this is an organization that has been broken for a long time," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Committee. "They do a lot of good things but are certainly not doing everything they should well enough."

[fireblade]

I am not even affected anymore (my D4D was already sold) but would like to help out. Are you prepared to form a group of D4D owners that will go head on with TMP to finally address the issue and stop the case to case approach and it is under warranty anyway reply.

Remember that this will take time, effort and money to progress. Will you just sit down and watch from where you are right now or do you want to help? We will make this as structured as we can by setting a SMART mission and vision. I am giving this thread a week to progress, if not I will quite know where you stand.


I created a separate thread for this and you may want to post your reply there.


Thank you .

1. Fireblade - 09228905142 / 5148755

[dekzee]

i would like to give toyota the benefit of the doubt. remember, toyota has overtaken GM as the largest car company, and that did not bode well for gigantic american ego's. i'm not saying that their cars are faultless but there are a lot of factors at play especially political ones.

now, every american driving a toyota would have something negative to say about their cars, even the most minor of things. and this is intensified by the media, which we all know, are no different from our politicians who like to grandstand things.

let's wait for the formal investigations before we give conclusions.

[niky]

i would like to give toyota the benefit of the doubt. remember, toyota has overtaken GM as the largest car company, and that did not bode well for gigantic american ego's. i'm not saying that their cars are faultless but there are a lot of factors at play especially political ones.

now, every american driving a toyota would have something negative to say about their cars, even the most minor of things. and this is intensified by the media, which we all know, are no different from our politicians who like to grandstand things.

let's wait for the formal investigations before we give conclusions.

There already was a formal investigation.

Toyota has been sitting on this problem for over a year... sometimes two, in certain markets. There have been nineteen deaths.

The US government finally decided to step in only after an ex-policeman was killed. Toyota only agreed to the recall after they were forced to shut down operations in the US as per order by the NHTSA. There's evidence that Toyota tried to cover it up, from the lawyer who last year accused them of conniving with the US government to cover up defects such as this one.

Even the Japanese government is starting to step in, warning Toyota to take these issues seriously (politics... Japan versus Japan! Because we know the Japanese government loves GM... as do European governments... because they're recalling, too.)

While Toyota is usually pro-active when it comes to recalls, in this one case, they were incredibly reluctant to admit anything was wrong with their cars. Now they're paying the price.

Back in the mid-90's, Toyota sacrificed everything for quality. Their older Corollas are legendarily tough and reliable. But on their way to becoming number one, they started cutting corners. Stopped over-engineering cars in order to increase profit margins, in order to make enough money to expand.

You could see this in the degradation of plastic and build quality in recent Toyotas. In how it took them so long to upgrade their engine packages. Now they're paying the price for being number one so fast... so soon.

They'll get out of this hole, though, and hopefully they'll be much better for it, and more like the Toyota of old.