Toyota’s time for reckoning

  What started as a crack in Toyota’s sterling reputation has widened to a gaping wound. Billing your products as the safest cars on the road puts a lot of pressure on a company. As long as consumer reports are rosy, that pressure is not an issue. But Toyota’s recent plague of recalls have been punching holes in the Japanese giant’s public standing. It’s true that few heads turned when, in 2005, the company recalled 75,000 of it’s eco-friendly Prius hybrid units after reports that a software issue was causing the car to stall. However, a 911 emergency call from the driver of a 2009 Lexus ES 350 with his accelerator stuck and his brakes failing sounded a much louder alarm and prompted the recall of 4.5 million units of select models in North America and Japan. Then, in early February, it happened again — a programming glitch in the