Toyota – or: Why acceleration is not always a good thing
Seeing executives of car companies testifying before congress is not too much of a novel picture. It has happened before. But the context of today’s and yesterday’s appearance of Toyota’s top brass in Washington provides a lot of food for thought. We have followed the news for a while and it took things to unfold to convince us that this is actually a very interesting issue not just for business, but yes, for business ethics. It is indeed – and even more so, as one of the seminal cases for the business ethics literature has been a rather similar problem. Remember the Ford Pinto, in the 1970s, where Ford had installed a gas tank which exploded at the slightest collisions and allegedly killed more than 500 people? That case though was clear cut in some ways: Ford decided not to deal with this problem for six years because the cost difference between fixing the car versus compensating the victims amounted to $7.04 per car – too much to ask for a company whose only goal at the time was max...