Akio Toyoda: 'I will do my best'

The president of car giant Toyota faced a huge backlash from the Japanese media yesterday for failing to offer a convincing explanation over the massive worldwide car recall.

Akio Toyoda, appointed to the top job at Toyota Motor Corporation last June, emerged at a long-awaited press conference this weekend to apologise and address criticism that the company mishandled the crisis over sticking accelerator pedals.

But he stopped short of ordering a recall for Toyota's iconic Prius hybrid for separate braking problems.

Toyoda's appearance before reporters at a company office in Nagoya made the front pages of the country's leading newspapers, but won no praise.

The recall has sullied the reputation of the world's biggest car maker and Japanese corporate icon.

"Words are not enough," the top Nikkei business daily commented in an editorial.

"The company's crisis management ability is being subjected to severe scrutiny."

"Utterly too late," the nationwide Asahi newspaper said of Toyota's delayed reaction since the crisis arose on 21 January with a global recall of millions of vehicles.

"The entire world is watching how Toyota can humbly learn from its series of recent failures and make safe cars."

At his first news conference since the recall of 4.5 million cars, Toyoda promised to beef up quality control and said he would head a special committee to review quality checks, go over consumer complaints and listen to outside experts to develop a fix.

Toyota's failure to stem its widening safety crisis has stunned American consumers and experts who had come to expect only streamlined efficiency from a company at the pinnacle of the global auto industry.

"Toyota needs to be more assertive in terms of providing consumers comfort that the immediate problem is being addressed ... and that it can deal with these crises," said Sherman Abe, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

It took prodding from the US government for Toyota to recall the vehicles, about half of them in North America, for accelerator pedals that can stick and cause sudden acceleration.

Asked if he should have acted more quickly, Toyoda replied in hesitant English: "I will do my best."

The company name is spelled and pronounced differently from the founding family name because Toyota was considered to have a luckier number of brush strokes when written in Japanese.

Toyoda is the second successive Toyota president to apologise for car defects. The first, Katsuaki Watanabe, shocked a news conference in 2006, bowing low to the group before promising to improve quality.