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Toyota, the high-and-mighty king of the vehicle import industry, has seemed to have gone the way of Yurtle the Turtle – right down into the mud. Safety recalls are fairly common in the car industry, we’ll give you that, and many of those companies who do issue recalls typically don’t face any fallout; but Toyota has a reputation for building some of the best cars on the road today, and the amount of recalls in the past six months alone has been staggering. The unintended acceleration problem that plagued many of Toyota’s vehicles has been blamed for at least 19 deaths and over 2,000 accidents, but the problem doesn’t stop there.

Toyota’s entire reputation for unmatched quality is faltering, and it’s looking like there’s only more bad news on the horizon for the auto maker. But the biggest thing is the handling of the myriad of problems: Toyota had to almost literally be pushed by the US Department of Transportation to recall their vehicles, and even then Toyota offered bogus reasons for them in the first place. The auto transport industry has seen a marked decline in the number of new Toyotas being shipped, and this mirrors the fact that Toyota sales have dropped by 16% while GM, Ford and Nissan have all seen sales skyrocket by over 15%. These recalls have cost Toyota over $2 billion so far, and the total is only climbing.