Dear Toyota Motors:

Dear Toyota Motors:

I thought you Toyota folks working at Corporate Headquarters would like to see this post that I put up on my world-wide blog today. For your information at latest count my blog has over 1,478,000 subscribers.

My blog post was as follows:

"Yesterday I received a recall notice for my wife's Toyota explaining that I should bring the car in to fix the recent well publicized idiopathic accelerator problems. I told my wife that I would switch cars with her for the next few days until I can get the car in and that I would make an appointment right away at the dealer. When I called my local Toyota dealer I was told the earliest appointment I could get to fix this problem is May 24 th at 11:15 AM. I informed the service rep that, while I was sympathetic to how difficult it must be to address the recent recall issues in a timely fashion, and that while I am sure that, as a statistical matter, any one individual's risk of sudden acceleration (leading to, for example, 94 MPH run-away cars on LA freeways) is low, we are simply not comfortable driving a car (with ever increasing reports of sudden, endogenous, unstoppable acceleration) unfixed for over two months and that if May 24 is the earliest our car can be fixed (it being March 9 today) please be assured that our names can be added to what I imagine is a growing list of people who can Categorically State Right Now that, with a certainty factor of 100, we will never buy another Toyota again even if it is the last car on earth.

I am sympathetic to the difficulty you find yourselves in and do not for a minute believe any of the quality control deficit issues you are facing were intentional on Toyota's part. I watched Mr. Toyoda recently testify before Congress and he seems to be a likable fellow although in the back of my mind I sensed he might underneath it all be a bit maniacal and I can kind of picture him in better days at staff meetings a few years ago going on about becoming the largest-car-manufacturer-in-the-world and ramping-up-production-while-also-cutting-costs in a slightly "over the top" kind of way.

That said, I think that when a serious safety issue like this arises you really do owe it to your customers to figure out how to fix the problem immediately (night shifts at the service center and or/ weekend hours for example). While I realize that there would be a high cost associated with adding night shift and weekend workers to your staff it would not be hard to find additional workers given the number of unemployed people currently available in the tri-state area. By the way, I was told that the repair is time consuming because the entire front floor carpet will need to be shampooed as part of the acceleration problem repair and that shampooing the entire front floor of the car is time consuming (multiple shampoo applications and drying time being what they are). I happen to know a number of recent college grads who are looking for work who would be happy to be temporary car carpet shampooers on the night (or weekend) shift. Also, I for one would be happy to bring the car back in May for the shampoo aspect of the fix if only I could get the sudden, endogenous, unstoppable acceleration problem fixed say, this week?


Sincerely - Rough Fractals (a current, but with a certainty factor of 100 soon to be, former, Toyota owner)