Toyota takes a dive
20th February 2010

A year ago we bought a Toyota Corolla. It’s a beauty – sleek, comfortable, drives like a million bucks and, according to the Dog and Lemon Guide, as safe as houses. In the past fortnight mounting revelations of faulty brakes, dodgy steering and sticky accelerators have made my Toyota seem as safe as a house in Haiti. I look at it sideways. What tiny menace lurks beneath its smooth features? What miniscule distortion of metal, what nano-slip of engineering mars a cable or lever or rod, biding its time, waiting to pitch me off the road?

I hesitate to read a newspaper or watch the news, fearful of further stories about my marred Corolla. Have the airbags been holed? Will the cigarette lighter explode?

I note with interest, and unease, that Toyota’s executives have decided, after a short interval of denial, to get everything off their chests. They are almost tripping over themselves in their rush to reveal the faults in their fleet, wisely realising that now the media is hunting them it will all come out anyway. They are wonderfully measured in their debasement of themselves, falling on their swords with the naked formality unique to Japan.

Interestingly, as the world’s most trusted car maker sinks to its knees it drags with it a host of lesser known but equally important businesses. One of these is Koito Industries. Koito is part of a group of companies that earn their living making components for Toyota and other companies. As far as I know Koito doesn’t make the sticky accelerators or slippery brakes that may or may not be fitted to my Corolla but it possesses a marvellous little scandal that is an intriguing sidebar to the Toyota story.

Koito makes aircraft seats. It sells them to airline companies all over the world and you are sure to have sat on its products. The airline industry has very strict rules about the safety of its seats. Each seat must be tested for strength and fireproofing. A few years ago there was so much demand for its aircraft seats a few of Koito’s engineers decided they didn’t have time to test each seat. They fabricated test results and even developed software that produced acceptable results when industry inspectors came to call.

There are now 150,000 suspect seats winging around the world in over 1,000 Boeing and Airbus planes. I’m sure I’ve sat in a few – they’re the ones that wobble and feel lumpy. Or was that just the inflight peanuts?

Koito’s dodginess creates a big problem for the airline industry, which is far more readily spooked than the car business by any taint of poor safety. Replacing or checking the safety of the seats will take time. In the meantime grounding every aircraft fitted with the dodgy seats would ruin half a dozen of the world’s biggest operators.

Airline companies are scrambling for strategies to reassure passengers they remain safe despite the risk of their seat falling apart beneath them. Some have suggested passengers should remain standing throughout their flight. Safety information has been modified to include advice about new brace positions for collapsing furniture. It is reported that budget airlines are considering ripping out all seats and requiring passengers to bring their own chair or sit on the floor. Early trials of this strategy led to problems with unbalanced aircraft as groups of passengers clustered together to play cards and complaints that passengers were looking up the skirts of cabin crew.

In Japan Koito Industries has been placed under an official improvement order – the industrial equivalent of home detention – while Toyota bandages its reputation. And as I nervously drive my Corolla to the airport I wonder if the seats on the aircraft will have been replaced by rows of beer crates.