quality
By John Rosevear, The Motley Fool
| 3:20PM 1/31/2012
Despite its troubles in recent years, Toyota retained its crown in Consumer Reports' annual survey of auto-brand perception, but the survey also showed that Ford is rapidly closing the gap, and other brands aren't far behind.
| 9:00AM 1/06/2011
A day after the influential Consumer Reports dented Ford Motor Company with its findings that the automaker's new MyTouch on-board electronics system was balky and distracting, it said that its readers ranked the U.S. automaker as equal with with Japanese automaker Toyota in how positively they...
| 4:15PM 1/05/2011
Toyota's recent spate of quality woes have allowed competitors to steal sales from the beleaguered automaker. Ford is also catching up with Toyota in another important measure of auto industry success -- consumers' opinions of vehicle brands.
| 7:00AM 11/27/2010
Expect your T-shirts to get a little bit thinner next year -- and maybe a little more expensive. Apparel retailers are looking high and low for ways to keep from passing on too much of their own rising costs to consumers. The trick: Doing so without hurting quality.
| 11:00AM 11/01/2010
VW has set a hefty goal for itself: to displace Toyota as the world's No. 1 car company. The German automaker is actually within reach, thanks mainly to its huge lead in China. To overtake Toyota, however, VW will need to really ramp up sales in the American market.
| 9:45AM 11/01/2010
Rich Skrenta thinks he has built a better search engine. This week, he's launching Blekko, whose web searches will only accept information from curated lists of trusted sites, mediated by users to filter out irrelevant results. But can Blekko compete with Google and Bing?
| 4:15PM 10/26/2010
Although Honda and Toyota remain the benchmark of reliability in the U.S. automobile industry, General Motors has made considerable strides in improving the quality of its cars and trucks, according to the magazine's 2010 Annual New Car Reliability Survey.
| 12:30PM 8/26/2010
Toyota Motor (TM) is voluntarily recalling about 1.13 million Corolla and Matrix compact cars to fix a faulty engine control module that can cause driveability problems, such as stalling.
| 4:40PM 7/08/2010
After a series of recalls, Toyota is attracting fewer car owners who drive other brands, despite generous incentives and a massive media campaign to address concerns about quality. Nearly half of all new cars sold at Toyota dealerships this year included a Toyota trade-in, up from 42% in 2009.
| 10:10AM 7/07/2010
Acknowledging that "fast growth of the past decade has been too much in some areas for the company to keep up with," a Toyota VP says the carmaker will extend product development by four weeks and add 1,000 engineers to quality control.