Blog Stage 3: Critique

In this article in the New York Times, "Questions For Mr. Toyoda", the author argues that Toyota should’ve solved the problem of their cars accelerating for no particular reason. This article is intended for the general audience as well as the consumers who went through this horrific ordeal. The author pretty much stated many facts and incidents that had occurred in the past to keep the audience interested while presenting this argument. The author states that the President of the Toyota Company, Akio Toyoda, will have many questions to answer, due to the fact that this has been an issue since 2001, and just this past year Toyota decided to recall their cars, after killing at least 34 people. The author claimed that at first the government did not pay much attention to this issue and made Toyota recall only a mere 55,000 cars in 2007. Finally when a Police officer crashed and died two years later in 2009 did Toyota make their biggest recall, a whopping 4.3 million and another 3 million earlier this year. Why is it that people, when faced with problems, do not do anything until someone gets seriously injured, or dies? This is one of the questions that the author addresses in this article and the good news “is that the federal safety agency is now taking a much more aggressive stance” (1). It is clear that the author uses much facts and reasoning to support his claims and arguments. This article was a very successful one in presenting its facts and convincing the reader that Toyota did wrong to its buyers and should have dealt with this issue long before. I agree with the author in its argument that Toyota should have dealt with this issue when it was first brought up and not so late, especially not 8 to 9 years later. That was just ridiculous and I used to think the Toyota Company as one of the best car dealerships ever, I even own a Toyota Camry. I don’t think that neither the Toyota Company nor the Government, knowing about this, did a very good job on handling this issue. If they had just recalled those cars in 2001 when this issue was first brought up, all this could have been avoided and possibly have saved 34 lives. But now the question is how will Toyota convince people to trust them that they have fixed the problem?