With panic among their constituents running high and lawsuits piling higher, members of Congress are vowing to go after Toyota for sending 8.5 million vehicles on the road only to recall them for potentially dangerous design flaws. But a recent study by Edmunds.com shows that over the past decade, Toyota’s complaints pale in comparison to those of some other companies.
Earlier this month, Edmunds.com analyzed federal data and found that Toyota ranks 17th among automakers in the number of complaints per vehicles sold from 2001 through 2010. The auto consumer website crunched data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s database and found that Toyota received 9.1 percent of complaints but sold 13.5 percent of new cars bought in the U.S. Land Rover, Suzuki and Isuzu were the top three in the Edmonds.com analysis. Chrysler ranked seventh; Ford was tenth and General Motors followed at eleventh.
“This is a very small problem here,” Dow Jones columnist Al Lewis told Fox News on America’s Newsroom. “We have had 2,000 complaints in a decade against the back drop of millions and millions of cars sold,” referring to the number of unintended acceleration complaints received by NHTSA.
However, auto industry expert Lauren Fix tells Fox the problem shouldn’t be minimized: “When you have all the complaints and Toyota has three times more deaths with the unintended acceleration than any other manufacturer combined, we have a problem.”
The Toyota investigation also puts government officials in the unusual position of policing and punishing one automaker while serving as part owner of another. The federal government is a 60 percent shareholder in General Motors, one of Toyota’s biggest competitors. As Toyota’s driver loyalty levels have dropped over the past month, GM has seen its own rise.
No matter the government’s role, Lewis says lawmakers have no teeth to take on Toyota. “All they can do is yell at a guy and we have seen what happens, to executives when they go before Congress in the past. Nothing. Nothing,” Lewis said. “They get humiliated for a day and they move on. Congress and NHTSA and our government isn’t fit to solve this problem.”