With the announcement of another Toyota recall, it seems that everyone and their dog have an opinion about Toyota, and some of them might even be drawing the right conclusions. While everyone is allowed to have opinions (not the dogs—on quality matters I don't trust entities that consider cat poo a delicacy), it’s interesting to note that Toyota’s was not the biggest recall, not even the biggest in recent memory. So why do they get all the bad press—and what does it mean for quality?

My students started me thinking about this in an online discussion. First off, let’s put the Toyota recall into historical perspective:

Figure 1: Recall ranking from www.rpmgo.com/11-biggest-auto-recalls-in-history

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