Posted by
Bert Chapman on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 6:16:10 PM
This week congressional committees have been holding lengthy and often emotional public hearings into the mechanical failures experienced by Toyota cars. These failures have, sadly, resulted in the deaths of a number of individuals and done grievous damage to Toyota's product quality reputation and, potentially, to the automotive giants long-term economic viability.
These are challenging times for the U.S. and global auto industry. We've seen Chrysler and General Motors have to turn to the federal government and to taxpayer dollars to sustain their operations and both of these moves have been greeted with extreme displeasure by many people of all partisan and ideological stripes. Car companies also are having to cope with declining sales in a global recession and with various environmental, safety, and fuel economy mandates issued by various governmental laws and regulations.
These companies have also hurt themselves by making their cars to complicated, excessively dependent on electronic technology, and pandering to lazy consumers and their spoiled brat kids by installing unnecessary devices such as GPS satellite technology, cell phone players, satellite radio, and DVDs. In Toyota's case, a vainglorious drive to become the world's number one car company resulted in an institutional working culture that essentially compromised auto safety to achieve production and market share goals.
Toyota and other car companies should learn that they must first make dependable, durable, safe, and high quality cars that meet citizen's basic transportation needs without unnecessary technological ruffles and flourishes. Consumers don't need GPS to find their way around town or across the country. They just need to read and comprehend a paper map and pay attention to where they are going by planning ahead. Even Obama zombies are intellectually capable of that! Consumers also need to read their cars owners manuals and take care of them by getting regular oil changes and other preventive maintenance so these cars can last several years. Toyota and other car companies are perfectly capable of producing such cars if they'd stop pandering to self-indulgent consumers who think the car they drive must be some personalized expression of an idealized image.
The federal government also needs to take a close look at how it interacts with car companies. Congress should use the Toyota recall to examine the quality of the automotive industry laws it has written and determine whether all of them are necessary. It should look carefully at the way the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been effective or ineffective in its regulation of the auto industry and also scrutinize and reverse possible harm EPA and Energy Dept. policies may have had on auto industry safety performance. Congress should also look carefully at its own oversight performance, and recognize how a culture of automotive industry incompetence has been encouraged by Detroit area congressional representatives such as John Dingell through their insistence that U.S. auto companies and workers could ignore the growing globalization of car production and continue spending more money on its elements of a sometimes unproductive workforce and their union allies than they could afford.
The Toyota crisis should be a time of soul searching for all auto companies and government regulators. The car plays a profound ly important role in American economic development, societal mobility, and in promoting personal freedom. It's time for all of us to work to ensure that the cars of the future meet the basic transportation needs of individuals, families, companies, and the government without compromising safety and without unnecessary technologies which complicate their operations and make operating and maintaining these vehicles unnecessarily expensive.