If you haven't heard, Toyota asked their dealers to stop selling eight of their models due to a recall of over 2.3 million Toyotas impacted by unintentional acceleration.   This stop-sale includes the popular Toyota Camry, Corolla, and trucks and SUVs from 2005 - 2010.

This recall and stop-sale underscores something that I've been saying for a while now: 

Consumers should not make their buying decisions based solely on the perception of higher quality.

Why?

Because over the last ten years, the quality gap has been closed between most of the major global automakers.  All of today's automakers deliver very high build quality.  Most of the automotive production plants around the world are either new or have been retooled with the latest in complex and sophisticated robotic technology. 

The vehicles manufactured for sale in the United States are required to have even higher levels of technology to deliver a safe, comfortable and environmentally-friendly vehicle. 

All of this means that all of the major manufacturers produce outstanding quality, and none of them really holds the "Quality Banner" over the others now.  (For more on this, check out tomorrow's blog post "Taking a Closer look at Quality".)

To put it quite simply, what happened to Toyota could happen to any of the major automotive manufacturers. 

Toyota Today, Audi Yesterday

Toyota's recall is due a sticking accelerator problem that they are working to discover and correct, which they undoubtedly will do. 

In fact, they could have their engineers contact Audi's and seek a little guidance, as they had to deal with the issue of unintended acceleration way back in the 1980's. 

Audi learned that there were no "ghosts in the machine" causing the cars to take off.  Their engineers discovered that the design of the accelerator and brake pedals were too close together in height - causing some drivers to occasionally mistake the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal.

We all have Audi to thank for is the innovative shift-lock technology that was born out of this issue.  (Shift-lock refers to the safety restriction that requires drivers to have their foot on the brake in order to shift out of park, which wasn't a standard feature at the time.)

This issue nearly brought the manufacturer to their knees over twenty years ago however, since then they have recovered and become one of the most innovative and high-quality auto manufacturers today.