Toyota Venza leaves a lot to be desired

Dan Carney • E-mail

It frequently has been observed that it is easier to stalk the leader than it is to preserve that position once it is achieved.

A case in point: The struggles Toyota has endured since overtaking General Motors as the leader in worldwide car sales last year.

The Venza, a new, hard-to-define crossover-wagon thing, may well be Toyota’s predicament embodied in steel, rubber and glass. And plastic. Loads of cheap, shiny, sloppily installed plastic.

Having apparently concluded that six Toyota-brand SUVs and a minivan were not enough to target every potential customer for hauling families, Toyota introduced the Venza as a 2009 model.

It's unknown whether this was the result of a genuine belief that the company should offer a product in every imaginable category, or because hubris led Toyota to believe that the Venza would find buyers who eluded the very similar (and discontinued due to lack of interest) Chrysler Pacifica and Ford Taurus X crossovers.

Toyota reached the top of the industry by use of its “kaizen” system of continuous improvement, key attributes of which have been widely adopted industry-wide. But somewhere along the line “continuous improvement” became “continuous cost reduction” and it shows in all the company’s recent products.

The interiors in particular are awash in cheap-looking, shiny plastic. Likening the Venza’s apparently ready-to-hose-clean, plastic door panels to something from the toy aisle would insult Buzz Lightyear and Woody.

Worse yet, the plastic bits in the test model weren’t installed correctly, so the cut lines between pieces were misaligned in places and the dashboard air vents had shockingly large, irregular gaps around them. These are the things that killed GM’s image. Now Toyota is making the same inexcusable mistakes.

Even the big doors have a tinny, cheap sound when opened and closed, another unexpected trait in a Toyota. With these astounding failings, can unreliability be far behind? Is it here already but we don’t know it yet?

The cabin looks good in photos, and the designers surely had high hopes for the final result. But it seems the continuously cost-cutting accountants whacked the budget for decent materials, so the plastic fake wood paneling fell to the level seen on televisions in the late ‘70s, when TVs still tried to look like furniture.

Toyota says it uses real leather for the Venza’s seats, but the material was so hard and shiny it was indistinguishable from the perforated vinyl that Volkswagen and BMW are offering in their entry models.

Toyota extends its poor track record with its calibration of the Venza’s electric power steering. Electric power steering offers benefits to car makers because it is cheaper, cleaner and simpler: No hydraulic pump drains power from the engine and there are none of the attendant hoses, plumbing or fluid.

But six decades or so of development have left hydraulic power steering assist finely honed to provide superb steering feel and feedback, which are critical attributes for engaged drivers. Electric power steering can be calibrated to perform almost as well, but many car makers, Toyota included, don’t even seem to try. Either the company discounts the importance of this or it figures that its car-as-an-appliance customers can’t tell the difference.

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