Is Toyota victim of own success?

Well that perception has gone out of the window in recent months as the once bullet-proof Japanese giant that had clawed its way to being the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer, has been looking at a lot of blood red figures in its accounts.
The sympathetic among the world’s observers of things automotive will tell you that the soft underbelly is a function of the global recession, that the skids are not of Tokyo’s making.  To some extent I would agree, but only to some extent and let’s have a look at why I hold that view. Firstly, I firmly believe that by far the majority of the world’s motorists are not motoring enthusiasts at all.  They buy a car, and it’s a reluctant purchasing decision in the first place, for no reason other than to get from A to B with a very good measure of certainty.  In other words, things mustn’t go wrong.  If you’ve ever roamed the streets of Paris, you’ll soon work out why residents of super-high density cities don’t really need a car in their lives.  There’s just no space to keep them safely and on top of the sheer inconvenience factor, they’re actually quite expensive things to have sitting on the side of a crammed street, doing nothing.  If the back pocket is coming under pressure, why on earth spend your bucks on a motor car?
The fact of the matter is that even though practical factors come to the fore in making a purchasing decision, there’s no doubting that style and the feel good factor have a part to play in tipping a decision one way or the other.  Now there’s not a soul around who would disagree that reliability surveys have put Toyota near the top of the tree for years.  Reliability also ensures that customer satisfaction is looked after to a great extent but you’d have been asleep in recent years if you didn’t notice that Toyota hasn’t stood out from the crowd.  The top of the reliability tree is getting rather crowded these days so car manufacturers need to find another string to their bow.
I’d suggest that the increasing use of computer-aided design and the rapid advance of technology have much to do with the levelling of the playing field but where others have gained ground on Toyota is in the execution of their designs.  In many instances, they are simply more interesting, more attractive aesthetically and in some instances, they’re probably a nicer drive too.  I’ve had little practical experience of either  (however, I do read a huge number of publications which enables me to comment with a measure of authority)  but it seems that Hyundai’s i10 mini wins every time against, for example, Toyota’s Yaris hatchback.  The word starts to get out, even to those hordes of non-enthusiasts, but when those self same every-day motorists go to the Hyundai dealer, they find they are offered a 5 year/150 000 km warranty.  Is this a carrot or what?  For sure, it’s a caramel-coated carrot when the car it’s applied to is dynamically a good drive as well.
Now let’s go up a class or two and take a look at the Corolla.  This model, in all its guises, and there have been at least ten generations of them according to my memory, has sold in vast numbers around the globe, but interestingly, not in the UK or Europe.   The current model in SA represented a huge advance on its predecessors in terms of the quality of interior fitments and the space offered therein, but let’s be honest, its exterior styling is decidedly uninteresting, even frumpy in my book.  So, for all its worthiness as a means of transport, it doesn’t tick as many boxes as it might and this is reflected in its fall from sales domination in SA.  Likewise its now-departed cousin, the Run-X.
In the next class up, you won’t encounter too many motorists getting their underwear knotted up over the Avensis, now in a relatively fresh life cycle. 
For sure, the Avensis is a good solid car and its interior appointments again have received a classy makeover but if you’re going to be completely honest, this model does not move the class along in any particular area. 
Over the last decade, there have been a few stand out models launched and off the top of my mind, I think of the Golf 4 which raised the bar enormously when it came to the use of soft-touch interior plastics and things such as jewel-like headlights.
I also think of the Ford Focus which raised the class bar in terms of ride and handling through the employment of a fully independent rear suspension.
 Virtually all the opposition employed a cheaper system known as torsion beam (still widely used today) which offers a sort of halfway house independent system at much lower cost and with the benefit of space saving.  But it simply doesn’t work as well which forced VW to follow suit with its own fully independent system.
The newish Mazda2 has also received much coverage in the motoring press because it reversed a relentless trend towards producing heavier and heavier cars. 

(To be continued next week)