I thought every vehicle from the east coast rots away eventually ?
It's too broad of a subject so I'll only speak to one aspect, the class action lawsuit Toyota settled on regarding 2005-2010 Tacoma, 2007-2008 Tundra and 2005-2008 Sequoia, since it covered my truck.
The wording from the final order says specifically
"The frames for certain model year Toyota vehicles are prone to excessive, premature rust corrosion because the frames were not properly prepared and treated against rust corrosion when they were manufactured. Excessively corroded frames pose a serious safety hazard to a vehicle’s occupants because a vehicle’s frame forms the basis of a vehicle’s crashworthiness, including its ability to withstand or minimize damage to the occupant compartment in the event of an accident."
So they decided it was better to take a $3.375
billion settlement than have the question of what is "adequate" and "premature" be legally determined. Of course nothing lasts forever but there is an expectation that it should last some reasonable length of time. People were still paying on original loans for a truck deemed unroadworthy by their states' inspections, 4 years old in some cases.
This was on second gen trucks that they had already twice said "Trust us, we solved the frame corrosion issue" after 10 years of production. Perhaps it just looked bad and was a P.R. move just to keep it from looking worse. But that's an awful lot of money so they must have sensed it could be a big problem to let go to trial.
It is of course a subjective question and having a court decide to define it would be bad all around. But Toyota created this problem by making excellent cars 20 and 30 years ago that are now just average. They created an expectation that a Toyota truck should last 10, 20, 30 years maybe and when they don't it's a problem.
