dominant and most profitable automaker in the world that was accustomed to outsiders not say what to do, let alone an obscure bureaucrat from the United States, whose own car industries in taxpayer-funded life.
But in the middle of December, on a cloudy day in the middle of the main island of the Japanese archipelago, Ron Medford, the acting head of the U.S. agency that regulates the safety car, read the Riot Act of the Toyota executives.
Medford was quietly posted by the Obama administration to send a strong message to convey: Toyota, told them he had got better things to do, according to U.S. regulators.
Medford in Japan reached by the time Toyota is working with them to remember that more than 5 million vehicles would mean in the United States. The problem was, but potentially deadly very profane: Mats began the accelerator.
U.S. safety standards, regulators have had five deaths from accidents, which seemed to be the cause, and there are growing doubts whether the Toyota carpet and pedal design - a relatively inexpensive fix - the only fault was to be addressed.
In the past seven years the number of U.S. consumer complaints about unintended acceleration in Toyota cars has risen steadily, hitting 400 cases reported for the model year 2007, data for an analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But five earlier studies of the NHTSA Toyota opened under the Bush administration reached a dead end with no action taken. Two probes resulted in relatively inexpensive mat safety recalls by Toyota in 2007 and early 2009. Neither attracted much attention.
Get moving
In the closed door meeting in Nagoya, Medford four Toyota executives said the automaker was too slow in addressing the safety of errors in the investigation by U.S. authorities. He said he wanted to change, and he wanted them quickly.
NHTSA regulators, the new face to control the Agency's reply to the complaints from consumers about the Toyota vehicles provided a report on the meeting watershed Reuters.
One of Toyota officials in the room, Chris Santucci has been issued, two days before the week in a deposition chamber of the lawyers for the family of a grilled 77-year-old woman who was murdered in Michigan, 2008, when they took control and hit the Camry in a tree, only four blocks from her house.
Medford warning went unheeded. End of January, the security problems Toyota explode into a crisis that battered its finances and shaken consumer confidence in the most prestigious brands in the world and an icon in Japan's spectacular post-war economic success.
Since the visit of the U.S. team, have in addition a global recall of 4.7 million cars from Toyota, the largest ever for the safety of the automaker. Reported problems with the acceleration of the Camry is now the shadow of plain-vanilla sedan driven threaten the success of Toyota in the 1990s and braking problems, drag the green Toyota Prius show car "for a new era.
Moreover, critics charge that the automaker still not getting to grips with the root causes of safety and it has only just begun to realize is how badly they lost their way.
"Everyone can work on the Toyota assembly line, the cable pull and stop the line if a problem should be solved," says Ed Hess, a consultant and professor at the University of Virginia who has studied the risks of growth for large companies. "Why get where we are, why not, that someone at Toyota to pull the cord?"
Versions of the same question is asked on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill - as in Toyota City, a city in which experienced personnel crisis, with a corporate sense of joint responsibility, that the manufacturer has the pride encouraged.
Not "sit on our hands"
"We sit on our hands in Japan," said a 30-year-old veteran production manager at Toyota in a bar in Toyota City where the car manufacturer points out, dominated the chatter. Said another employee: "We have a sense of crisis. How can we not all the media attention?" Everyone feels that way. "
On 24 February, the U.S. House Oversight Committee set to grill U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Toyota USA Senior Executive, Yoshi Inaba, the reason why the safety problems, Toyota seemed to have spiraled out of control, and whether the reasons were fully identified.
A day later, holds the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's hearing on the safety of the Toyota crisis.
"I'm not that Toyota could not accept the points together," said Joan Clay Brook, called a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and an expert witnesses to testify in Congress.
In a way, insiders say Toyota has been a victim of its own dizzying success.
Consultants, suppliers, retailers and analysts say the rapid growth of the company's resources stretched to the breaking point. The additional burden of reaching a nearly constant cost in parts added to the pressure.
Others say that was a hint of complacency crept into the relationship with outsiders such as Toyota to the acquisition of industry leading position by sales in 2008 from General Motors. The continued back and forth with U.S. regulators about the safety gear change also makes a complaints against squatting, say critics.
"Toyota was once a good listener," said a consultant will be referred to the unnamed because he still needed to do business with the company. "But three to five years, it was something that was suddenly postponed. It was a view that there was no one outside Toyota's reply. She came to the point where the organization is one not to hear, but."
When the crisis hit in late January, Toyota stumbled a clear signal to consumers and investors. Centralize confidentiality of society and the tendency for decision-making in Japan contributed to the PR debacle, say the experts.
Is "Toyota has the perfect model for the years 1980 and 1990, but his approach now seems outdated," says Stefan Lippert, a business professor at Temple University in Japan. "The concentration of decision-making at headquarters is one of the factors behind the problems of Toyota now."
ENLARGE
The accelerator at a Toyota dealer on a display in the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in this February 3, 2010 file photo.
Photo credit: Reuters
"Getcha boots"
One of the organizational principles of the industrial ideology of the Toyota go "Genchi Genbutsu" a problem. In Japanese, this means that you must go to the place, touching the thing itself. You need to satisfy the customer, lift the hood, his hands dirty. Walk, do not talk, Fees Toyota employees.
It is a sentence, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder of the company, likes to trot. "Quality is the lifeline of Toyota," he said in his first public appearance in the United States after he became president of Toyota in June.
In their relentless pursuit of quality, Toyoda said the company had to live, and the two big ideas that they had a lot of breathing "Customer First" and "Genchi Genbutsu."
Some of the hired Toyota's first U.S. production workers for its flagship plant in Kentucky, two decades ago, joked that they listen to that last sentence differently in English. For them, it sounded like "Getcha boots."
After three months working and frustrated exchange with the U.S. Toyota's personnel security issues, which decided United States Department of Transportation in December last year to try a Toyota tactic to get attention from the automobile manufacturer. Medford has his boots and went to Japan.
In a crowded room at the headquarters of Toyota, 15 December, Medford, and two other senior officials NHTSA first edition was a remedial lesson in the U.S. regulations on the safety of some 100 Toyota engineers and executives, primer of how to operate the system.
When the Americans withdrew in a conference room in the apartment of no-nonsense warning to a smaller group hammer.
Blind Sided
Opposite the table stood Toyota top officer, the quality, Hiroyuki Yokoyama, and the head of the technical team, which handles complaints from consumers, Shinji Miyamoto. In a company that built its reputation on an almost paranoid obsession with quality, Yokoyama and Miyamoto was the keepers of the flame.
Toyota NHTSA officials knew that were adopted with Honda and Nissan in Japan and Ministry of Transport needs to be, so they were surprised by this difficult session.
"Back then we did not expect the talks to have a profound significance, because at that time we already had mat on the issue, said Toyota Executive Vice President Shinichi Sasaki.
Toyota officials in the proposed area in Medford that had perhaps taken the placement of floor mats for the unintended acceleration cases, the more stringent checks on the American side was responsible.
NHTSA officials chastised Toyota for "still under discussion in these words," Sasaki recalls.
The irony of the moment was rich. It was a little-known U.S. official in one arm of the government, most Americans could not identify the Toyota lectures on quality. The same U.S. government, which was rescued by General Motors and Chrysler, only four months earlier was missing sore Toyota.
Santucci, a former researcher, who had joined Toyota in 2003, NHTSA Japan flown from Washington for a tense meeting.
He had the same broad presentation that officials of the car manufacturers in China and Russia, which had given the two major risk newcomers without sales presence in the United States had expected, "he said in his statement one weeks earlier.
But it was Toyota. This was the company's car that the factory production control in the 1960s, a revolution that has the luxury Lexus brand on the opportunities in the late 1980s and then puzzled skeptics in the 1990s by providing the Prius and lead into a synonym for environmental management.
Economic
Toyota had in 2009 to an economic powerhouse, with more than 300,000 employees. Estimated in the United States, where more than 35,000 employees stand in the middle of a web page to more than 380,000 jobs automotive industry including dealers and suppliers.
For all the success of the company, Toyota employees gathered yet to achieve the impossible. Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe, who used the top job on hold until June 2009, they say that can build a car that goes from New York to California on one tank of gas. Build a car that the air cleaner or the driver that a healthier, he used to say.
Fast-forward a few months and the picture could not help it. In February, Toyota has been in full retreat. After two weeks largely outside the spotlight, as a hasty excuse Toyoda press conference in Nagoya.
Toyoda, who earned an MBA from Babson College and worked for Toyota in California is fighting for an English-language Soundbite when you are prompted. "Believe me, Toyota is the car to safety, but we try to increase further improve our product," he said. "This type of procedure is good for the customers." Clumsy clip on the CBS News played and gone through YouTube.
With Super Bowl Sunday, two days later, Toyota had refined the message in a TV commercial. The place was listening back to Toyota for more than 50 years history in the U.S. market with pictures of happy families. "In recent days, our company is not expected to live the standards of us - or that we expect of ourselves," said a spokesman.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post ran "an editorial in Akio Toyoda, a day before the first conference committee meeting is planned. "If the president of Toyota, I take personal responsibility," he said, and promised to be a top to bottom "review of the activities of the company.
What he does not answer is how this happened. Tenor of the company means that employees ask why ( "Naze" in Japanese) at least five times at the bottom of a problem. It is not clear how many "Nazes" are requested by the management.
ENLARGE
A Toyota employee for signs on vehicles that have a turnover pedal freeze pending the amendment of the accelerator at a Toyota dealer in Daly City, California, February 2, 2010.
Photo credit: Reuters
Cracks in the armor
In October 2007, Dave Champion, auto testing director of Consumer Reports in Connecticut, confronted with a shocking outcome of the most influential survey of the subscribers to the magazine.
"After years of sterling reliability, Toyota will see cracks in the armor," Champion recalled. In a bomb, the non-profit magazine showed the V6 version of the Camry and two other vehicles from the recommended list.
Around the same time in Bloomington, Illinois, a team of number-cracking accident investigators saw a disturbing pattern. A team known as CRASH on private property insurer, State Farm had noticed an increase in accidents involving Toyota vehicles, including the best-selling Camry.
State Farm, the largest U.S. insurer automatically notified U.S. regulators of the pattern. "If we believe that a vehicle played a significant role in the onset of damage that we are back to the manufacturer," said spokesman Kip Diggs. "We tell them:" We believe that your product is defective and you should pay us for the damage. "
"If you are starting to significant claims activity that suggest possible problems with a great product, if you see the NHTSA," said Diggs. "It was a major activity that happened is a clear trend for this."
Toyota insiders and rivals elsewhere had begun to be so, other signs of distress in an organization determines that started the decade with the aim of the global market, doubled to 15 percent. The result was implicitly understood by everyone in the industry to overtake GM as No. 1
To take on the threshold, which began the benchmark, some in the Toyota to worry. To her mind, was always the goal as a bold course of the gates of Toyota, Vision Watanabe as a car, which determines the air clean. Toyota had been allowed to fall as the target, but now it had happened.
"We ourselves feel more comfortable behind someone else and not No. 1," said Yoshi Inaba, who recalled from retirement to the right activities in the U.S..
Checks and balances broken
In 2007, Toyota U.S. sales exploded by 80 percent since the beginning of the decade. The market share has almost doubled to almost 9 percent to 16 percent. In drug units sold, while Toyota was half the size of the car manufacturer Honda has absorbed the bump still moves through the hose.
"The checks and balances" began to break, "said Vikas Sehgal, automotive industry expert and partner at Booz & Co." At one point, the dis-economies of scale come into play. "
At the same time Toyota was itself struggling to newcomers to the unique culture of the society - the Toyota Way to impress. Kazuo Akatsuka, 55, saw firsthand the generational change and signs of change in the factory concerned Tsutsumi, where they build the Prius.
Akatsuka fear that a new generation of temporary workers, sporting dyed hair and piercings, fair working conditions for a salary. They would not have bought the Toyota Way, "he said.
"The people were so precise, people who sweat and built this company is no longer here. And to a certain extent I think that passion is not passed," he said. "I feel like the attention to the quality gradually into oblivion."
The Toyota Way of Life, the workers who are long books, the distilled wisdom of Sakichi Toyoda, a self-contained self-taught inventor, textile equipment manufacturers, formed about Toyota, and his son, Kiichiro, which he was riding in a car have industry in 1937.
Over the years, developed the Toyota Way, like a strange mix of simple, be lent to. Avoid some advice - "be faithful to ... your tasks in a practical and frivolity" - seemed a relic from a hard scrabble Japan. The ongoing fight to kill the waste ( "muda") produced legendary thriftiness of the company.
Further insights from abroad. Eiji Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyota's cousin and the officer sent his first major wave of U.S. sales growth has toured Ford Motor Co. and returned home with the idea for the improvement of the suggestion box of a worker he had seen. And so, the company legend was born "kaizen," the ethic of continuous improvement.
Renewed inspiration for Toyota just-in-time production is a post-war visit to the U.S. supermarket chain Piggly Wiggly, where self-taught engineer Taiichi Ohno saw shelves when they emptied the consumer.
Five decades later, The Toyota Way has been a culture in itself, but also much deeper Japanese Toyota. In 2007, the company is a Toyota University in California and led to a Toyota Institute in Japan to Toyota, like Toyota to learn.
Jim Press, the first to be appointed non-Japanese on Toyota's board, had in 2006 thought that the emphasis on culture allows the automaker, "the way a country ... for a society in itself." At that time, was seen as the embodiment Press from Toyota, a soft-spoken man from Kansas with a self-effacing style.
"Thank you for your interest in our small car company," said he welcomed reporters.
In September 2007 shocked, on a train, industry observers, but now it seems the pressure on Toyota to keep everything together went to help a chance to run Chrysler press underlined. "It's great to be back on the home team," he said.
ENLARGE
Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda, a live press conference in Nagoya, central Japan, on February 5, 2010.
Photo credit: Reuters
Paying for a screw-up
Toyota knew how to run a textbook remember. As Toyota's Lexus brand in 1989, launched the eagerly awaited LS400 by a series of errors, including the tail lamp to overheat badly hit. The recall threatened to kill the luxury brand in the cradle.
Toyota suspended production and ramped Issue of replacement parts. The California-based sales arm, sent representatives to each of the 8000 LS400s that was sold and the owners to send you a free, while repairs were under way to meet loan. The cars were washed and returned with a full tank of gas.
Lexus dealers and customers were impressed by the attention and the brand went to BMW and Daimler AG in the U.S. market over the next two decades of sales records.
The success story made Toyota Dealers deep faith - and rich. He also rejected the investment, of which, the Toyota dealer would set a franchise groups continue to command a higher price and service from the rest of a wild cyclical industry.
By the end of September 2009, Houston-based Group 1 Automotive has 39 percent of sales of new cars from Toyota-income business. Fort Lauderdale-based AutoNation was 21 percent. In a suburb of Detroit-based Penske at 20 percent.
"Toyota is facing the biggest automaker in the world. It certainly has problems, but you have to credit them. They are faced with the reality. They continue," said AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson in September, before the first of two massive recalls .
Dealer pep talk
In part because Toyota had kept a tight lid on the number of dealers, the team was far more profitable than the U.S. auto dealers. In 2008, during a recession selling Toyota dealer in the average of four cars per day. The average sold a Ford dealer.
In a speech last month, partly committed in the retail destination, Toyota contain the damage to the brand recall announced in September for the risk that the carpets could fall accelerator.
"A recall is an opportunity to connect to the customer in a way that we can not prove in advance and again that in their eyes," Inaba, 12 January, said during a speech at the Automotive News World Congress to forge in Detroit.
But four days later to know - Saturday - Toyota, the security experts in Washington, NHTSA said that the agency had an error with an accelerator of CTS Corporation, a provider of Indiana that the car manufacturer had begun production in 2005 while in use with its rapid growth detected .
The problem: The accelerator built CTS - $ 15 per share - down in some cases due to wear and humidity, had found Toyota. The bigger problem: The vulnerability affects than 2 million vehicles and car manufacturers do not yet fully developed a way to fix this problem quickly.
On 19 January, Inaba Toyota U.S. sales chief Jim Lentz and others were summoned to Washington. NHTSA officials say they said they wanted immediate action. Toyota executives said a few hours later saying that they were a reminder startup.
From bad to dire
The announcement on Thursday 21 January saw bad for Toyota. But the situation was much the following Monday. U.S. safety regulators said competent, Toyota the unprecedented step of suspending the sale of eight models would have to take a while to find an urgent solution.
With one blow, Washington lost 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in stocks of unsold cars and trucks to dealers of the automaker. Worse, the negative publicity was driving away buyers in the last week of the month, usually the highlight of the showroom traffic.
Toyota dealers rushed with daily updates and telephone conferences to keep informed. However, the frustration has started to boil.
The lines of communication has also been implicated. Sometimes, Toyota, California-based sales arm seemed not to know, what did the production of arms or Kentucky that had belonged to her team in Washington rules on a fast-moving talks with NHTSA. Sometimes turned in the opposite direction.
In one example, said Toyota dealer representatives on the morning of Wednesday 27 January, the company would expand its recall of 1.1 million vehicles mat. Toyota noted that putting five other models, like the 2010 model year, Venza Yaris and Matrix, the risk that their accelerator remained open floor mats underneath.
But the move was not given to an audience known to more and more nervous and could not for the hour, a hole that some traders immediately worried.
"Our jaws drop when we heard that," said one, who said the episode showed how the company was slow to address the use of the security crisis.
Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons spoke to the question of the comment of the afternoon, said the recall is "an unfounded rumor." Shortly before 8 hours of the night on the east coast, from Toyota in Washington, the papers presented risk of an expanded recall Mat officials.
In a move that has led to similar criticism, and signed at least one action in California, Toyota quietly fixed a problem with the brakes on the Prius vehicles still on the Japanese assembly line in January.
But not the consumer informed that Toyota had found the bug, or developing an update to the software controlling the Prius brakes for the safety engineer Yokoyama told reporters in Tokyo on 4 February.
At the Crossroads
Analysts say Toyota's wild ride at a crossroads. It has a chance to begin to trust the old school way back, but given the risk that the research is half of the conference activities of the Crisis "opens.
"The damage has been done to the reputation," said Jeff Hess, a professor of marketing at California Polytechnic State University and a former automotive analyst at JD Power. "It's not the message immediately. They are hundreds of merchants and millions of customers."
Asked Sean Kane, the founder of Safety Research & Strategies and an expert who is in Congress next hearing, said Toyota has the possibility that he remembers problems with unintended acceleration in its vehicles over the models it, and facing outside the corrections described.
Back there in Toyota City, there is evidence to the peaceful resolution of the auto manufacturer are much more in the coming weeks.
"The difficulty with a company - a company - is great that people solve the problems," said a Toyota manager, who asked to be like most others not mentioned by name. "If you is not doing anything about it, which fail as businesses. But our task is to this sense of crisis in which so many workers as possible drilling."
When it goes on sale across Europe after its world premiere at the Paris Motor Show, the French firm's Golf-rival will be offered with a total of three petrol (plus one LPG capable) and three diesel engines.
Model: 1997