Deny, deny, deny, saith Toyota.

Last updated on January 3, 2023

It’s almost Easter. I don’t know if other people know the Bible as well as I do, but Jesus predicted  that a disciple – I had to look this up, it was Peter – would deny that he knew Jesus 3 times before the cock crowed, and he was soon crucified.  Sad for everyone. So I was going to put the 3 denials in this cartoon, like What Would Toyota Say?, but I didn’t think that many people would get the reference.

And Toyota denied even more times than that. I know this because it was a bone, the LA Times could NOT let go of! They wrote about the accidents from the very beginning. Of course some of those famous runaways did happen in the Southlands (here), but I do find it interesting that the Times did such an investigation about Toyota, and yet ignores so many other things around here.

Apparently sales are up, anyhow! I had a Toyota Corolla. It always overheated, even the first year. I never got an answer why, so I drove it mostly at night – I’m a night bird anyway, but it was really unfortunate and aggravating. And the brakes wore out sooner than other cars, but nothing drastic, like the new ones.

Here’s a cartoon of how the powers that be at Toyota may have responded to the reports before the Times got their teeth into it: through cliches, and denial.

It just seems that if they copied other car companies – Sit back and enjoy the ride came from some other car company, didn’t it? What me worry is from MAD Magazine, of course. Comme ci comme ca is a French cliche – that maybe they could deflect attention from their terrible accidents. Anyway, their cliches made it funnier in this cartoon. YMMV, of course.

The Times has an interesting article today about the “Toyota Man” in Japan:

He works punishing hours, clocks in unpaid overtime without complaint and allows his bosses to call the shots both at the office and at home.

He’s the archetype of the perfect employee. He’s a Toyota Man.

The Toyota Man’s handbook is the decades-old “Toyota Way,” a company manifesto that emphasizes continuous improvement and teamwork in the car-making process — a corporate game plan imitated and studied across Japan and the industrialized world.

“The level of employee control at Toyota is almost fanatical — all basically to increase production,” Mehri said. “There’s no privacy at all, no walls in the work spaces. Employees sit at desks facing each other surrounded by bosses on the periphery.”

Cartoon caption: Toyota PR. Deny and distract. Sit back and enjoy the ride. Comme ci, comme ca. What, me worry? Not my fault, I just work here.