Special Coverage
Toyota's Safety Crisis
The number of visits to Toyota.com surged during the third week of January, when Toyota Motor Corp. announced its sticky-pedal recall, data from a Web analytics firm shows.
Data from Compete Inc. indicates visits to Toyota.com rose from about 800,000 the week of Jan. 17 to 1.2 million the week of Jan. 24.
Toyota announced it was recalling 2.3 million vehicles for potentially sticking accelerator pedals on Jan. 21.
While the 1.2 million unique visits to Toyota.com was high, the number of visits is not unprecedented and is on par with auto maker website traffic during last year’s “Cash for Clunkers” promotion, says Lincoln Merrihew, Compete’s managing director-Automotive.
Compete data shows the same week Toyota.com experienced a high volume of visits, 600,000 searches were made on major search engines using the words “Toyota” and “recall,” or the names of certain Toyota models plus the word “recall.”
This volume is up from about 160,000 searches with the same keywords the week of Jan. 17.
“One hundred and ten thousand of those (people searching) went to Toyota (websites), which is good,” says Merrihew. “It gives Toyota a unique opportunity to manage (the recall situation).”
The challenge for Toyota is nearly 500,000 of the 600,000 searches resulted in visits to non-Toyota websites, mostly news or social-media websites, Merrihew says
“It means Toyota doesn’t have the ability to influence consumers directly. They also have to manage everything else that’s out there; what’s being said on the news sites, third-party sites, social sites, everything else – it’s a huge undertaking.”
Meanwhile, Toyota today says it is investigating faulty power steering with the ’09 and ’10 Corolla compact car. Shinichi Sasaki, TMC’s lead quality-control executive, revealed the internal investigation to media in Japan, reportedly saying it could result in another recall for the auto maker.
Some Corolla drivers in the U.S. have reported experiencing a loss of steering control, typically occurring at higher speeds.
Sasaki says Toyota has received less than 100 complaints about steering issues in the Corolla. At the same Japanese press conference where Sasaki spoke, TMC President Akio Toyoda said he does not plan to visit to the U.S. next week to appear at two U.S. government hearings.
“I trust that our officials in the U.S. will amply answer the questions,” Toyoda is quoted as saying. “We are sending the best people to the hearing, and I hope to back up the efforts from headquarters.”
Yoshimi Inaba, Toyota Motor North America president, will appear at a Feb. 24 hearing of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and a Feb. 25 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.
Toyoda says he will travel to the U.S. at a later date.
