The punishment Toyota is taking over the acceleration problem in some of its models is surely unusual in tone and in volume. I say it's unusual because Toyota had become one of the world's most trusted brands, a trust that seems to have evaporated. Toyota has gone from a more-or-less revered corporation to the trash heap of capitalist swine of "criminal" intent seemingly overnight.
The tone and volume of the punishment is likely an offshoot of the US government's ownership of both General Motors and Chrysler. Now that the Feds have an ownership stake in GM and Chrysler, it will use its available resources to lash out at threatening competitors for the companies' own gain. It's what business owners do.
But going back to the tone and volume of the punishment, Tom Blumer has an excellent column describing how people once went after American automakers with all the abandon people are now going after Toyota. An excerpt:
Yes, to name just a few examples, Ford Pintos had serious problems with exploding gas tanks. Yes, GM equipped some of its vehicles with transmissions that turned out to be suitable only for the flattest of terrains, and a few of its cars and trucks would pop into drive while idling. Yet as much as the tort bar would like to convince pliable juries that big companies, except for their unwillingness to spend a little money, can achieve perfection with every product that comes off the assembly line, it just isn’t so.
The legal and media narratives in many of the lawsuits that arose from these and other matters almost inevitably morphed from “the company made a serious mistake and should pay for it” to “this evil company and its evil executives were perfectly okay with seeing people continue to die, so they need to be sent a message and empty their coffers as punishment.” Meanwhile, at least until the late 1990s, trial lawyers tended to leave foreign makers alone, at least partially because U.S. CEOs supposedly imbued with excessive capitalist greed made better targets for sympathetic jury verdicts than supposedly less corrupt and more accommodating foreigners.
But going after the Big Three, or at least two of them, isn’t what it used to be. During the last half of the decade, the financial viability of each was often in serious question. Now that the government has effective control of GM and Chrysler, any trial lawyer trying to go after either now knows that he or she will be facing a defendant backed by potentially unlimited resources and with lots of potential dirty tricks up its sleeve — tricks that it didn’t hesitate to use during the two companies’ respective encounters with bankruptcy.
Read the whole thing, as they say. HT Glenn Reynolds who calls it "an orchestrated campaign against Toyota in overdrive."