Editor's note: At the time this interview was published by Gemba Research LLC, Toyota hadn't announced a fix to the sticky accelerator issue that caused the company to recall approximately 2.3 million select vehicles. On Feb. 1, the company announced that its engineers have developed a solution that involves reinforcing the pedal assembly, which will eliminate the excess friction that has caused the pedals to stick. According to a Toyota statement, the problem was caused by "a friction device in the pedal designed to provide the proper “feel” by adding resistance and making the pedal steady and stable. The device includes a shoe that rubs against an adjoining surface during normal pedal operation. Due to the materials used, wear, and environmental conditions, these surfaces may, over time, begin to stick and release instead of operating smoothly. In some cases, friction could increase to a point that the pedal is slow to return to the idle position or, in rare cases, the pedal sticks, leaving the throttle partially open." In other words, a design issue as pointed out below.

This doesn't seem like the Toyota we know. The latest recall from Toyota related to its faulty accelerator continues to expand. Toyota has stopped sales of eight major models in the U.S. and the jury is still out as to how far this will spread to sales in Japan, China, Europe, and other major markets. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Toyota has a fix:

"The company is calling the equipment repair a “spacer” that would be inserted into the gas pedal, increasing the tension in a spring and helping to prevent the accelerator from sticking in position."

For the nontechnical person, a spacer is a an inexpensive piece of flat metal, rubber, plastic, fiber, or other material used to fill a gap or change spacing between two parts of a mechanical system. Although admirable in its simplicity, the spacer as a solution seems more like a band-aid than a root cause countermeasure in this case.

I have reported before on the cost of Toyota’s run to become number one is global vehicle sales, particularly in the area of recalls, and speculated about the erosion in quality at Toyota throughout the past few years as evidenced by the unusually high level of recalls. To gain some perspective, I spoke with Chris Schrandt, one of our senior consultants who spent 10 years in Georgetown, Kentucky, as the quality engineering manager for Toyota.

Jon Miller: What kind of conversations are going on right now at Toyota?

Chris Schrandt: It depends on what the truth is. For Toyota to have missed something that big in the design would be huge. I know the push at Toyota has been toward commonization of parts. This has been great for cost reduction. It still seems inconceivable that all of these vehicles have the same mechanical problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s the truth that so many vehicles can have the same problem, same supplier, or same design. It doesn’t seem likely based on my experience at Toyota. We always had back-up suppliers, so the current problem implies that it is a Toyota design issue with several suppliers all making the good products to a bad specification.

JM: What is the nearest comparable thing you saw when you were there?

CS: We never saw anything this big. My former boss who started up the San Antonio [Texas] plant had some pretty big drive shaft issues they found pretty late in the game. That was about five years ago. We never had to recall anything from the Georgetown plant. Maybe we had to get the dealer to look at a couple of hundred vehicles, but that was it. Unless it was a safety issue, it used to take an act of God to get the quality vice president to send out a warranty notice to the dealers to look at something, so the scale of this is incredible.

JM: What makes you say it’s not a mechanical issue, as their spacer solution seems to imply?

CS: A mechanical issue implies either identical flaws across different parts, or some common part with problems across many models. This problem started with the Lexus, which is a different set of parts and now it has spread to other Toyota models. There is no way one supplier produced 5 million of the same parts. I read that the European plants are running so that means something isn’t the same between their parts and the parts at the other plants. The spacer as a solution doesn’t ring true. The body between these three models wouldn’t be the same. This suggests that it might even a software issue.

JM: What would you be doing if you were at Toyota right now?

CS: I’ve never seen anything like this before. I can’t imagine shutting down Georgetown for any reason. We never went into an emergency shutdown while I was there. Sure we slowed down when sales were slow. If Toyota had a fix, every new vehicle would have the correct part. They would have jumbo jets flying around the world to keep the plants running. Was it their intention to idle the plants to free up the workers to help out at the dealerships? Even that’s inconceivable. It sounds like they really don’t have a root cause countermeasure.

JM: You brought up an interesting point. Some say that Toyota is being opportunistic, using this quality problem as an excuse to idle their plants on purpose to cut operating costs while demand is down and dealer inventories are up. What do you think?

CS: Nothing catastrophic has happened recently to sales that would cause Toyota to take that action. This problem has hurt their reputation, and shutting factories hurts their reputation further. I don’t believe they would do that opportunistically. It’s short-term thinking. They have slowed production down before, but never quite like this. Toyota would fly parts in on jets to keep the plants running. For example if it was an American supplier and they couldn’t figure out the problem, they would have a Japanese supplier make the parts and fly them in from Japan. In fact, I was flown out at 2 a.m. on Sunday to Delphi because it was three months to launch and there was a quality issue. That’s how seriously they take it. It’s not like other automotive companies who would just say, “Oh well, we can catch it during our first recall.”

JM: Thanks for your time Chris. Do you have any closing thoughts?

CS: The magnitude of this problem is historic. Toyota always errs on the side of safety and quality. People have lost their lives due to this defect. I am sure that the leadership at Toyota is working tirelessly to get to the root cause and correct all of the problems as quickly and efficiently as possible.

© Gemba Research LLC