Did Twitter Topple Toyota?

It was a despicable calculus that in the end cost Ford far more than $121 million. It still costs the company, even though the fiery deathmobile has been gone for decades. And while the Pinto might be the car that drives the modern recall movement, with carmakers almost more willing to bring cars back than run the risk of trashing their precarious brands, there have been others. In the 1980s, Audi, then a second-tier German luxury automaker with a gimmick that would later become commonplace—all-wheel-drive—witnessed its efforts to compete with Mercedes and BMW laid low by an unintended-acceleration problem that would presage Toyota’s woes. It crushed sales. Audi spent two decades restoring its brand integrity.

Carmakers handle brand-Armageddon in widely different ways. General Motors combated its Corvair disaster of the 1960s essentially by pulling political strings and ... well, by being General Motors and outlasting the negative press. Still, the Corvair debacle gave us the modern era of consumer advocacy, through Ralph Nader, who attacked the car in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed.

And the modern era of consumer advocacy set the stage for the social-media feeding frenzy that has been the Great Toyota Recall of 2009. This isn’t (yet) the largest recall ever; Ford holds that sad distinction for a problem with cruise control in 1999 that brought 14 million vehicles back. Nor is it the most stunning in terms of what you might call bad karma; that distinction also belongs to Ford, which endured a tragic rollover problem with its bestselling Explorer SUV in the early 1990s. That recall led to an acrimonious severing of Ford’s long relationship with tire supplier Firestone and decisively connected the concepts of “rollover” and “SUV” in the public consciousness.

But that all happened a decade before Twitter. Think about it: Prior to the advent of rapidly updated social media, bad news about cars seeped out at the local level. A pattern of accidents here. A sudden uptick in complaints to dealerships there. Like pre-9/11 intel—and, well, like post-9/11 intel—it was difficult to connect the dots. Sufficient evidence to warrant even a NHTSA investigation could take years to organize. Deadly cars could remain on the road for far too long, as an automaker sought to control the damage before the recall news broke nationally.

No more. Anyone with access to the Internet is now a micro-Nader, an antlike information-gathering-and-broadcasting agent who can contribute his experiences and interpretations to the data stream. This is why the Toyota recall has achieved brushfire velocity and stunned a company that, just two months ago, was literally on top of the world, with the most loyal customer base arguably ever assembled by a carmaker. With the monster recalls of the past, it was as if a manufacturer had been hit by a heavyweight punch. Reeling was followed by a determination to fight on, unless the company was knocked out (as Audi almost was). For Toyota in 2009, it was very, very different. This time, it wasn’t the big blow. It was death by a million tweets.