This week's perspective from Joe Chidley:When you're under siege, look for weakness in your enemy's line of attack – and exploit it. Until recently, Toyota had been suitably and skillfully repentant in its communications around the recall disaster. (Loyal readers will recall that CEO Akio Toyoda scored a Touchdown from me for his mea culpa before the U.S. Congress a couple weeks ago.) But not anymore. This week, the company and some select backers went on the offensive against research from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, which in late February had suggested the infamous unintended acceleration could be recreated without triggering any fail-safe mechanisms. A technical issue, yes, but one that calls into doubt Toyota's recommended fix for the defect that led to the recalls. But the company saw an opening. It assembled a group of experts to firmly and publicly reject the research at a news conference in California. The experts included Toyota's own technical guru, a top-notch consultant, and an academic from Stanford University, which is just like Southern Illinois-Carbondale, only bigger, more prestigious and more credible. Their message was, basically, that the rival research could never occur under road conditions – that it was completely out of touch with reality. Holding a news conference over this relatively small part of the criticisms of Toyota might seem like overkill, but that's the point. By attacking a weakness in the mass offence aimed at it, Toyota was trying to put the offence on the defensive, while tarring further criticism with the same brush. Very smart.
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