08 April 2010

I am lucky enough to drive a Toyota. In fact my household has two of them, one of which is too old to even creep into the current furore.

That leaves me with one Toyota which, fortunately, has an accelerator which has never shown any inclination to stick. I bet the vast majority of the 179,000 other owners are in the same boat. Toyota has identified the problem and said it will fix it. It might take 8-weeks but, that is good enough for me.

So why, suddenly, has Toyota become the industry’s whipping boy? What more could the carmaker have done? What’s the difference between Toyota and Honda which, itself, this week also recalled 170,000-plus of its Jazz models in Britain? Why are all the headlines about Toyota? Why are there acres of space in all the papers being devoted to Toyota’s problem and, by comparison, very little devoted to Honda?

Well, that harrowing phone call from a family, just minutes before they were tragically killed in a Lexus in San Diego, did not help the situation. But that was last August, and it was a Lexus not a Toyota.

Then, US transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, warned: ‘Stop driving your Toyota”, something which he later watered-down. But the damage was done.

Those two events lifted the Toyota recall out of the motoring pages and onto the front pages. And the whole issue has got out of hand at a time when the snows have melted and are no longer news and when editors are fed-up with the Iraq enquiry.

Of course, until Toyota gets the necessary parts from Japan to fix the problem – expected in the UK this Wednesday – there is a small risk involved with driving one of the affected models. But the whole of life is a risk.

Stick with it, Toyota. Tomorrow, the front pages will be concerned with more celebrities cheating on their wives and more MPs cheating on expenses.

Have a good week, both in and out of the showroom.

Barry Hook