DETROIT — In a few short weeks, Toyota has done what General Motors, Ford and other automakers have failed to accomplish for decades: erase the perception that the Japanese automaker’s cars are of much higher quality than those of its rivals.
A series of recent safety recalls — totaling more than 8.5 million vehicles worldwide — has cracked Toyota’s bulletproof reputation and given rivals an opportunity to capture some of its customers.
Toyota stumbled as industry sales are just starting to climb after the worst slump in 30 years. It’s not yet clear which automakers will benefit most, but several stand to benefit and are wooing Toyota drivers with new ads and incentives.
“The perception game has changed,” said James Bell, an executive market analyst for the vehicle-information company Kelley Blue Book.
According to Kelley, 27 percent of new-car shoppers who were considering a Toyota before the recall are no longer contemplating the brand. Nearly half of the buyers who have defected from Toyota say they may never consider the brand again. Kelley questioned 406 people before the recall and 285 after it.
Ford, Chevrolet, Hyundai and Honda have made the biggest gains with those customers, Kelley Blue Book said.
David Tompkins, vice president of analytics with , said the crisis also is starting to affect Lexus, Toyota’s luxury brand, which has seen the number of buyers intending to purchase the brand drop by 25 percent in the past two weeks.
Those customers are now looking at Audi, Acura and Volvo. His data are based on 3.5 million website visits per week.
Publicly, rivals insist they’re not gloating.
“There may be an opportunity for us to get some consideration from folks that we didn’t get before. We’d like to sell them our vehicles based on the merits,” GM’s North American president Mark Reuss said Wednesday at the Chicago Auto Show.
At Ford, chief U.S. sales analyst George Pipas noted that chief executive Alan Mulally has long admired Toyota and implemented its global production system at Ford.
But Bell said that at a recent executive-level meeting at one of Toyota’s rivals, participants were grinning from ear to ear.
