We Were Toyota Guinea Pigs!


CULTURE WARS BY JIM MCCORMICK

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posted 02/09/2010
In the 1990s, my wife and I were retired teachers. We spent part of our time driving around the U.S. selling books that she and her former teaching partner had written and published for the kindergarten curriculum. As the books became more and more popular, we would drive farther and farther east with heavier and heavier loads. We would sign up for an exhibit table at a convention, arrive a day early to set up, and spend two or three days selling books. In our ten-year-old sedan we would haul as many as a thousand pounds of books to far-off cities like Dallas or Nashville or Boston. We decided we needed better transport.

In 1999 we chose to buy the newly-designed, Toyota Sienna van. Friends and relatives liked their Toyotas, and the van had just received the highest safety rating in government tests. Our choice, however, proved to be a poor one. The Toyota van was safe enough, but terribly unreliable. And before purchasing it we failed to notice certain irritating qualities of the van. For example, on very curvy roads it tended to lose stability. It was also irritating that the face of the radio was down too low to be easily controlled. And when the defroster was on at an effective level, it was so noisy that the radio could not be heard.

But the biggest defect was a flaw in the engine-the dreaded oil-sludge problem. After we had owned the van about a year, we received a letter from Toyota advising us that the problem existed and that if our engine should "freeze up,"

Toyota would repair or replace the damaged parts. The downside for us was that we now had lost the kind of trust in a vehicle you need when making long trips with heavy loads. Our nearly new van could fail at any time, in a snowstorm, in the desert, or out in the middle of nowhere. We had ended up with a lemon for a van. And of course, its resale value had plummeted.

Some other Sienna owners whose engines had failed instituted a class-action suit against Toyota. But only those owners who had provable damage to their vans could collect from Toyota.

Here's what really frosted us. About 1992, I went to look at a "newly-designed" Sienna van. And guess what? The radio panel had been raised to eye level where it should have been all along. And guess what? The van had been widened by four inches to increase stability on curves. And guess what? A new engine design had eliminated the oil- sludge threat.

In other words, owners like us, who had purchased the first generation of Siennas from 1998 to 2001, had been GUINEA PIGS for Toyota's engineers. Rigorous quality control testing in those models had not been done. Or even worse, the testing had been done and been ignored by management. In either case, some in management must have known the Sienna was faulty. We, the consumers, had to be the ones testing the cars. And we had to suffer the financial hit from the bad engineering.

I am hardly surprised that Toyota is now, ten years later, seeing a huge drop in sales of all its vehicles. That several models of the current Toyotas are lemons--some with serious safety issues--has come to the world's attention. It did not have to happen. Firing is too good for the irresponsible, top management of Toyota. Their dealers, their employees, and their customers will feel the hurt for many years.

Would you buy a Toyota today?

Jim has had several careers, all connected with writing. He has been a technical writer in the rocket industry, a college English prof, and most recently a freelance editor with the Northwest Editors Guild. jimmc@sanjuanislander.com