I was surprised to learn that Toyota still has not issued a worldwide recall of its troublesome Prius NHW30 model, even though one had gone out in New Zealand.
   In layman’s terms, the brakes allegedly don’t work when you want them to. In more complex terms, the software has trouble distinguishing between different types of braking, and drivers may experience a delay in ‘pedal feel’.
   I was always a bit sceptical about the recalls over the unintended acceleration, given that the last time I heard those words, they were in relation to a falsified report from CBS’s 60 Minutes, a show known to me for making up stories (Killian memoranda, anyone?). Hearing them again, I thought it was just another excuse for the clumsy driving of a few individuals who couldn’t figure out where the accelerator was (which was what happened with Audi in the US). But it seems this matter has been around for a long time, and recalls were being done even last year.
   But the Prius matter, something that has not come under a global recall, appears more serious than carpets getting in the way, which is the problem behind the unintended acceleration complaints. AFP reports:

The Transport Ministry has received some 80 complaints in February about malfunctions in the brake system of the latest model of the flagship Prius, the Tokyo Shimbun reported without quoting sources.
   Five of them were actual crashes in which the drivers claimed the brakes did not work properly, the daily said, adding that the ministry would urge the company to launch an investigation.
   It was not possible to immediately confirm the report.

   Already Toyota has been berated by top management for going too far from its core principles by its honorary chairman, Shoichiro Toyoda. The company had been trying to sell big cars in China during the financial crisis, and spent a good part of the 2000s developing large pick-up trucks for the US market. Bloomberg reported last June that a meeting was called:

Shoichiro scolded the president [Katsuaki Watanabe] for being so anxious to boost sales and profits that he’d let Toyota emulate now bankrupt General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. Toyota had become addicted to big, expensive cars and trucks and had forgotten the customers’ need to save money, Shoichiro said, according to the person’s account.

   In other words, Toyota’s culture has been suffering, and we all know what happens when sales’ volume and profit are pursued at the expense of quality or engineering. (Ask Mercedes-Benz.)
   Toyota may be an example where too many niches were created, simply to get consumers in the showrooms—and now that’s coming to bite it on the rear end. Having too many niches has one immediate drawback: consumers no longer understand the structure of the range. Is the small car the iQ, Ist, Vitz, Porte, Belta or Passo? Do I move from that to a Corolla, Auris, Blade, Corolla Rumion, Probox, Raum, RAV4 or wotsis?
   The mistakes are understandable in some ways. Toyota had to create more new models as attention spans shortened. While a car might be able to be presented as “new” for two years in the Japanese market 10 years ago, consumers expect something else within half a year. To fund this appetite, the company looked for ways to maximize profits in every market—with the US one fuelled by bigger and bigger vehicles. It had to take costs out of cars, especially with electronics (by combining as many functions on to one system as possible) and architecture—and it may be these areas where the Prius suffered.
   But no company can really afford to pursue too many niches—Mazda overextended itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as did Nissan in the early 1990s—when times are tough. Toyota should have forecast a downturn, as many business experts did. The question that the company needs to ask itself is: what made it so blind in the 2000s?
   Even ignoring the idea of unintended acceleration for now, Toyota ends the lunar year on a low. It will always have its diehard followers—there are many models not affected by these issues—but the company must refocus its brand for the New Year toward its traditional principles. There is every sign the company knows that, with Akio Toyoda, the founder’s grandson, now at the helm, and doing spot checks down on the production floor. (I’d rather Toyota have someone like that than a “celebrity CEO” who gives good press. The era of the celebrity boss is over for now.) It is simply a pity that the company did not get on to its mounting problems—there are claims that unintended acceleration reports began surfacing with Toyota’s Lexus ES model as early as 2004—sooner.
   Few buy a Toyota because the cars make one’s heart beat faster. They are a default choice for many people who want the simplest conveyance from A to B. Akio’s job has been reminding his own team of that, and reinstituting the ‘Toyota Way’ and kaizen, terms that many of us who went to business school during a certain era recall.

The best quotation in the American media this week? In my opinion, it would have to be this:

Howard Stern is being considered to replace Simon Cowell when he leaves “American Idol” after this season.
   Apparently Satan was out of Fox’s price range.

From Tony Hicks in the Contra Costa Times.

We might get critical over the upcoming uniforms, but the service on Air New Zealand that I experienced was very good. The staff was brilliant (deserving of whatever award was given to them), and the personal screens remain a lifesaver for in-air boredom. (I was surprised that Lufthansa, an airline I used to enjoy flying, still has not caught up with what must be seven- or eight-year-old technology on any of the aircraft I flew.) Thank goodness, too, that we international travellers did not have to put up with the ghastly nude safety video (which is mostly distracting and not at all helpful).
   But it was not without problems. On the Auckland–Hong Kong leg, I had to ponder the following:

• why were the announcements in English and Mandarin, when most Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong people do not understand Mandarin? (How different are Mandarin and Cantonese? Ask yourself: how different are Danish and Italian? Same idea.) On a flight in 2008, I specifically had to ask the Air New Zealand flight crew to do announcements in the correct dialect for the destination. I managed to get two out of them before they reverted back to Mandarin. (Compare this to Lufthansa, which provided English, German and Cantonese on the Hong Kong–Frankfurt flight.) Now, if I were flying to Beijing or Taipei, I would get the fact that Mandarin was spoken. But to Hong Kong, where you might get stuck-up, proud southerners like me? I remain puzzled, because I have now taken enough flights to know the 2008 experience was not anomalous;
• why did the subtitles on the safety video switch from Chinese to Japanese three-quarters of the way through? (Let’s not even bring up the war on this one);
• why was a Korean film labelled as ‘Chinese’ in the menu, when it clearly was not? Apart from the actors’ names, the credits were clearly in Korean script. Unless Air New Zealand believes ‘Asia’ is one place. (On a related note, I am told that it is impossible to search for flights to New Delhi via the Air New Zealand website: India is not considered an important enough nation.)

   There are enough travellers going between the two countries for this to be very important to Air New Zealand.
   I’ll write to the airline today. I reckon the above needs addressing.

When Fiat was in the poo, I remember heading in to Italy and the cabs were a mixture of German and French cars, with a few Italian ones. Generally, it was a reflection of the state of the local motor industry: cab drivers are, perhaps subconsciously, patriotic and quite traditional. If they reject the local product, then that means trouble. (Look at New York: Toyota Siennas and Ford Escapes, which were originally engineered by Mazda, have an ever-increasing share of the market; compare that to when Checkers and Big Four brands dominated.)
   During my first visit to Sweden, most cabbies drove Volvo S80s, S90s and 960s. A few went for Saab 9-5s. Now, the home brands share space with Toyota Priuses and Mercedes-Benz B-Klasses. Again, it’s a reflection of the state of the Swedish car industry, with its American owners insisting Volvo and Saab sell large cars that did not conflict with their offerings from their sister Opel and Ford brands. The consequence is that as the world moved to small cars, Volvo and Saab had relatively little to offer. Even the patriotic cabbies had to buy foreign.
   It seems Spyker realizes the folly of this policy as it takes over Saab and vows to make the company a leader in automotive environmental technology, but the compact 9-1 still does not figure in its business plan formally. Will Geely realize the same when it comes to Volvo?

I have a feeling something is wrong with Cities I’ve Visited on Facebook. (Actually, something’s been wrong for a long time, either with the application, Facebook, or something between the two.) Not only has it not published new cities I’ve entered on this most recent trip, I now notice that while the important metropolis of Porirua, New Zealand has been included in the system, Hong Kong has disappeared from its database.
   I was wondering why my country count had dropped by one, and to my surprise, my place of birth is no longer considered major enough for inclusion by TripAdvisor’s travel app.

PS.: TripAdvisor says it has known of this error since late January, and has no idea how Hong Kong and Macau disappeared. The cities will be reinstated after it discovers how they were removed from the service, as it has done nothing to effect that removal.—JY

P.PS.: As of February 6, Hong Kong is back on the map.—JY

This is a punny one for my Swedish friends. I know this is an innocent warning sign, but when a foreigner comes and he has a different skin colour, his mind wanders on what it could mean!
   Here’s a bit of humorous context about a very inappropriate sign at the National Bank in Wellington, New Zealand.

Saw this old Mikado commercial a few days back:

and, after searching on YouTube, it appears that it was repurposed in Germany for a completely different product. Either that, or this came first:

   The top one seems to work better, probably because of the idea we have about conservative Japanese management.
   Any idea which is the earlier?

Blogger has announced that it will cease supporting its FTP publishing service, which means the shifting of this blog to Wordpress was well timed. It seems I would have had to shift in any case—the fact that this happened just over a month ago was fortunate.
   I received an email about this for the first time from Rick Klau, the gentleman who helped Vincent Wright and I restore his Social Media Consortium blog, today. I was surprised to learn from Rick that ‘only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP’ and ‘On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable’.
   After personal experience, I can say Rick is one of the good guys at Google, and I have no doubts about what he says. It highlights that Google wants to host as much of our data as possible, which, as readers of this blog have seen over the last year, is a dangerous proposition. If Blogger decides to pull your blog, then good luck getting it restored: you won’t have ready access to your data.
   In fact, if this blog was not self-hosted, I would have faced far greater concerns with my shift to Wordpress; and the fact that Vincent’s was hosted at Google almost saw to its total demise, if it had not been for Rick’s intervention.
   With hindsight, if it were not for the issues with the Social Media Consortium, my offer to help, and the subsequent stonewalling I received on the support forums, I might never have made the move when I did. Funny how things work out in the long run.

I will have more from my Swedish and French tour soon, but I will say that I had a marvellous time in Malmö and Lund on my first day in Sweden (especially getting a feel for Lund’s environmental programmes), Kristianstad and Hassleholm on my second, and on my return to Stockholm. A big-up to Stefan Engeseth and all the marketing and theatre groups who made me feel like a visiting dignitary. Paris, from where I write, has been wonderful to me once again, and it was wonderful joining my colleagues at the Medinge Group for Brands with a Conscience 2010.
   I also owe Facebook visitors an explanation on why I do not have a profile picture. The simple answer is that Facebook does not work, and I guess no one at Facebook has tested the software. Again.
   I select a photo from my album, right? The link I use is the one below:

Then, presumably, I choose the photograph I want:

I then ask Facebook to make this my profile picture with the link down the bottom right:

To which Facebook confirms my choice:

Only thing is, this doesn’t work. Here’s Facebook’s response to that confirmation:

Not particularly useful. Sure enough, it removed my prior photograph and this is what I see:

   We have become so used to using Facebook as our badges or masks, showing the world who we are. The inability to do something that everyone else can makes one feel very incomplete. In some cases, we feel Facebook is an extension of our personal brands.

Speaking of disability, Pete tells me that if one uses Opera, one cannot post or comment on Vox. Why am I not surprised?

I can’t explain why I like the Steve McQueen Ford Puma ad and dislike this one with Audrey Hepburn, even though I think the world of both actors. In terms of tacky, I reckon this one takes the cake as a celebrity endorsement:

Come to think of it, this is worse. I believe the original was Japanese (I saw stills of this campaign many years ago), but this is in Mandarin: