'Toyota Way' was lost on road to phenomenal worldwide growth

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2010 Toyota recalls

Last year, Toyota took the extraordinary step of suspending the manufacture and sale of some of its most popular models because of a flaw in their accelerators. Toyota executives soon were called to Capitol Hill for testimony and a probe was launched to find the cause of the problem.

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"The expansion was out of control and the engineers were very clearly stressed, working endless overtime," Smitka said.

He said harried engineers were often forced to borrow from existing models -- to save money and because they had no time to customize all new parts.

Less testing

Toyota's reach for worldwide domination -- the company said in 2002 that it wanted 15 percent of the global auto market and intended to be the No. 1 carmaker -- dovetailed with the rise of low-cost competition in South Korea and elsewhere.

To cut costs, Toyota "dramatically reduced" crash testing of new car models, according to Koji Endo, a longtime auto analyst and managing director of Advanced Research Japan, a corporate research firm in Tokyo.

"They do virtual testing using computer models, and it is expertly done," Endo said. "But from time to time there are unexpected real-world problems that the computer models do not account for."

One such real-world problem -- with the brakes of more than 400,000 Priuses and other hybrid models that were recalled on Tuesday -- occurs only when the driver of a slow-moving vehicle slowly applies the brakes while moving over a slippery or bumpy surface. The problem causes brief and sometimes frightening delays in perceived braking capacity.

Sasaki, the senior quality-control executive at Toyota, said testing of the Prius was "not able to identify" this problem. But he said he felt it when he stepped on the brake of a Prius last weekend during a test drive on an icy road in northern Japan.

Prius owners have been complaining for months about the brakes -- to the company and to Japan's Ministry of Transport.

An official from the ministry said that if Toyota had been paying closer attention to these complaints, it would have realized there was a safety problem.