Dents, bumps, muffles and polish!

In 2003, Toyota changed its tagline. Jim Lentz, now CEO in the US but at the time group vice president, announced the change, commenting that the company had chosen the slogan to show that at Toyota “we're never standing still”. What was the tagline? “Moving forward” .

In one of the commercials with the new tagline, a Toyota wheel rolls through different scenes, only coming to a stop when it crashes into a wall. The wheel that keeps rolling in this ad reminds me of how car crashes are often depicted in films. You often don’t see the crash, just a solitary wheel that rolls into view. Who in their right mind would come up with an ad for cars that could remind people of a car crash?

Despite my doubts about the ad, I did in fact buy a Toyota. I’ve never had any problems, but I was still concerned when I recently read that in some cars depressed accelerators (US gas pedals) were jamming. There have been car crashes, mainly in the US, with a reported 19 people killed in accidents allegedly caused by jammed accelerators. So far, Toyota has recalled close to ten million vehicles worldwide to fix accelerator pedals that have the potential to jam. The company president, Akio Toyoda, has apologized.

I’ve learned that my car is not on the recall list. I've also learned what I should do if my accelerator does jam. Basically, I should stay calm — and slam on the brakes and clutch and throw it into neutral. I think that slamming on the brakes would have been my instinctive reaction anyway. I'm not so sure about the staying calm part. How are the Prius drivers to stay calm when it's their brakes that could be faulty?

The media see the Toyota scandal as an excuse for wordplays in their headlines, using vocabulary normally used to talk about cars and roads. Here are just a few of them.

• Toyota: slow response dents company's reputation The Telegraph
  If you have a dent in your car, you have a hollow area, often from a crash. If a person’s reputation is dented, it is no longer as good as it once was. We can also talk about a dent in profits.

• Another bump in the road The Independent
  If there’s a bump in the road, the journey isn’t smooth.

• Toyota's Prius woes may muffle hybrid buzz The Independent
  When something muffles something else, it makes it harder to hear. In a car, a muffler is part of the  exhaust, used to make the sound of the engine quieter. Toyota's woes may put an end to the excitement about hybrid cars.

• Analysts expect Toyota to rally Carion Ledger
  In a financial sense, rally means to recover. A rally is also, of course, a car race.

• Polishing Toyota's tarnished image may take time scpr.org
  In this headline, we see polish, which can mean “clean something until it is shiny” and also “improve or refine”. If a metal is tarnished, it’s dirty and no longer shiny. If an image is tarnished, it’s damaged.

Why don’t you search for headlines on Toyota and see if you can find any more that use car vocabulary? Try this search engine for fast results: Newstaggr.