"Over a generation or so, Toyota built its reputation - and U.S. market share - on dependability, at a time when General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler couldn't shake being identified with lemons.
The company that once could do no wrong has stumbled badly though a series of embarrassments of disclosures, allegations and recalls. Experts now are debating how deeply these will eat into the consumer trust that is Toyota's most potent asset - and what it must do to recover."
You mean Toyota built its reputation on the preception of reliability. I am old enough to remember Toyota from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. They were hardly paragon's of reliability.
I guess I'd disagree. Maybe we were just lucky. My son bought a well-used Toyota Wagon to take to school in Massachusetts (we lived in Missouri). That thing went back and forth I don't know how many times, ran as well when he finished school as when he started.
I had a Datsun then that was a piece of junk. I looked his car over carefully and wished that I had his car instead of mine. Castings instead of pressed steel for covers, decent plastic instead of cardboard for electrical system insulators, etc.
I would agree with you on the Datsun (Nissan), not the Toyota.
i had many 70's and 80's toyotas so i think this guy is fulla shit. i had 1 77corolla that finally stopped when new england salt ate through it.
328,000mile. the i had an 86 2x4 truck with the amazing 22r motor. it was also a new englander but kept passing smogs so i replaced the bed at 290,000 miles and the cab at 387,000. i hated loosing the cab but it leaked cold air and the cassette player died. the guy with the body i bought tossed in a cassette. i kept that truck until 2002 when i gave it ti my idiot nephew. he replaced the junk in the 5 speed and gave it ti his half brother. he still has it. it runs loads of pig shit and cow feed around some hick midwest town. it still runs fine and looks so funky it's classic. i still have a 86 supra as the main ride. it needs paint and some fresh upholstery but that's it. everything works, crusie and ac. i stuck a refurbed tom tom on it and ain't no place we can't drive. according to the toc, there are still 90 86!/2 supras licensed on the road. not bad for a car only solf for 2 months. several have been converted to 89-90 standards so they aren't counted. yoyota's have been good to me.
GM Ford and Toyota is no better than the other. The fact is every manufacturers is making good vehicles today, the only real difference is style and price.
Mike, just STFU. You're an idiot. Any fool can see that there are real differences in design and quality between different brands of automobile. Any fool except you, that is.
There is VERY little difference. It's mostly perception and preference based on the quality problems of the domestics one or two decades ago. People have long memories. In the 70's you could figure on something going wrong with your domestic several times a year. Now it's pretty rare.
Balls. I've had enough minor issues with my company vehicles to seriously doubt they will be worth repairing, if it's even possible, 20 years from now. There's a 22 year old Porsche in my driveway.
I suggest one go to one of the Ford dealerships that are dueled with Toyota and look at all of the cars in the shop be repaired and you will see as many Toyotas as Fords torn apart. The difference is the Toyota shop rate is at least $10 more an hour and the owner paid 20% to 30% more to drive it home when it was new. ;)
We have thousands of vehicles in our fleet, almost all domestic. Just sticking with "cars" for the moment, generally when we get a new one we drive it for 150,000 miles and about 10 years and in that time it's rare to even have as much as one non-maintence repair a year. The last car I had that has now been retired was a 95 caprice. In the 13 years and 125,000 miles we had it it had to have three minor warranty repairs in the first couple years, after that I drove it for the next decade and never had to do a thing to it but routine maintenance. Our last two E350 Ford vans ran up to 250K with nothing needed outside the changes we made like bigger alternators to run equipment. V-10 automatics that were flogged for 250K miles and they ran like new when we auctioned them off and they looked like new (once they were shampooed). I see the same thing over and over with our domestic fleet vehicles. Yes, you may have had a couple problems but I can tell you that the current domestics are nothing like what they were producing in the 70's. I see a friend of mine plow big$$$$ into his imports while I'm driving one of our fleet vehicles I bought at auction - had 147,000 on it when I bought it, had 190,000 when I traded it in for case for clunkers. Paid $2500, drove it for 7 years, "sold" it for $4500. Put $1500 into it over the 7 years to make it like I wanted.
That's a non-fact, qualifying as a Michael Mooreism.
Equal numbers could be the result of a particular day schedule, more toyotas sold than fords, or that the shop has a reputation for properly servicing the toyota!
In the eighty I damn sure could count on something going wrong with my Toyota three or four times a year. Finally fixed it my getting a Ford. Trips to the shop for repairs immeadiately went to zero per year. So don't tell me how great Toyotas were in the 70's and 80's. They built some real POS just like every other manufacturer.
You won't hear me tell you how great the Toyota's was. I have never been impressed by them. Several years ago my Boss bought a Camry. After hearing so much good stuff about Toyota's I was prepared to be impressed when he drove to lunch. It was as dull a car as I think I had ridden in in years and basically seemed no different in anyway then any number of chevys and fords I'd been in. I know the couple of imports I've had were not at all impressive as far as durability and had nothing else special going for them either.
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