I would flip if I bought a new vehicle and had to have bodywork done because of something that SHOULD have been tested at the factory. Imagine if someone had something heavy on one of those tailgates thinking it would be held fine and it fell on them. That could maim somebody.


By the way, anyone else notice what the liscence plate says on the back of the truck... "Quality".... wouldn't want to advertise that!

 

As I mentioned, Tundra might not be the only Toyota product having some quality issues...

http://www.kcra.com/station/14478369/detail.html

The 2007 Tacoma is being looked at by the NHTSA. This is on top of an ODI recall

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/pr...rintVersion=NO

 

This isn't an anomaly, it is the new status quo...and to be blunt it isn't new. I've stated several time before that I worked with a tier one supplier for Toyota roughly a decade ago and saw first-hand how quality was no longer a primary concern even then. I stood next to the line on more than a few instances and watched the first car born of this new attitude, the 97 model Camry, roll down the line assembled in ways that would make you never want to get into one and actually travel down the road in it.

Over the next couple of years I watched Toyota gradually follow this same path with other models and now we've reached the point that Toyota's in general really are terribly cheap in terms of construction. For example the current gen Sienna is genuinely awful, the interior materials and fit and finish aren't even up to what I would have expected from a mid 90's Korean brand. And yet people still ooh and ahh over them like mindless automotons.

Toyotas still seem to prove reasonably reliable transportation and even do well on reports. But realistically a lot of this depends on the owner body, and their honesty, and these people are often scary in how far they will go as Toyota apologists. Other factors include the fact that Toyota owners typically take ridiculously good care of their cars, which works wonders even on a cheaply built car. And then we have the fact that Toyota likes to issue TSB's where they are supposed to be issueing recalls, etc. etc.

For the record back when I still worked for Toyota I made a comment to my father that it would take ten years for the reality of the situation to make its way into the world of perception. And here we are.

 

Toyota built great cars from the mid '70s, all through the '80s and into the first half of the '90s. Then greed, arrogance and a certain complacency with respect to quality caused them to lose their way, IMHO. In their quest to become the biggest automaker in the world, they forgot that old adage: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If they were truly that innovative, they would have learned from the mistakes of others and avoided stepping into the trap that the Big Three stepped into in the mid-70s...namely, the cycle of: strong reputation > arrogance > hubris.