{"id":1382,"date":"2010-02-07T10:21:11","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T10:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2021-03-07T17:28:55","modified_gmt":"2021-03-07T17:28:55","slug":"toying-with-toyotas-troubles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/?p=1382","title":{"rendered":"Toying with Toyota&#8217;s Troubles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a native of Detroit, the Motor City, I have watched media coverage of Toyota\u2019s troubles with an air of schadenfreude. I don\u2019t usually take pleasure in other people\u2019s discomfort, but I believe the hand-wringing I\u2019ve seen in media coverage on organizations from CNN to NPR comes from the shattering of blind faith in Toyota\u2019s product. I heard one host ask, breathlessly, \u201cwhat should I do with my Toyota? I mean, I drive my\u00a0<strong><em>children<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0in that car.\u201d (Emphasis added.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\nWhat I\u2019ve found interesting about watching both Toyota and the media coverage is that there is this sense of shock that anything could go wrong. Not to oversimplify the story, but by many accounts, Toyota was going through a growth spurt and had trouble keeping quality control during that process. Consumers and regulatory agencies have piled on enough scrutiny to force the company into action. And now Toyota is scrambling to safe face and customers.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\nI went through the bad-old days in Detroit, when the Big Four (remember AMC?) were just discovering that they couldn\u2019t push any old thing onto showroom floors and have people buy it. In the 1970\u2019s and again in the 1980\u2019s, there were some truly awful products cranked out by Detroit. And when autoworkers were climbing on top of foreign cars like Toyota, hitting them with sledgehammers, many consumers were abandoning Detroit in droves and rightly so. That\u2019s the way the marketplace is supposed to work. Build a better product, and you will succeed.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\nA recent blog of mine talked about\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/inside919.ning.com\/profiles\/blogs\/licking-the-toad-a-commentary?xg_source=activity\">\u2018<\/a>Licking the Toad\u2019. The sense of the statement is that bad news doesn\u2019t get any better with time. I think Toyota is living this example.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a native of Detroit, the Motor City, I have watched media coverage of Toyota\u2019s troubles with an air of schadenfreude. I don\u2019t usually take pleasure in other people\u2019s discomfort, but I believe the hand-wringing I\u2019ve seen in media coverage on organizations from CNN to NPR comes from the shattering of blind faith in Toyota\u2019s product. I heard one host ask, breathlessly, \u201cwhat should I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1383,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions\/1383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cameronknowles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}