Most people are bad drivers with bad driving habits. I’m not, of course, and you certainly aren’t.   But pretty much everyone else is.   That’s what researchers report when people’s opinions of their driving skills are compared to their actual performance.   It’s related to what cognitive psychologists call the  Dunning-Kruger effect:  the tendency of people  (particularly the least competent) to vastly overestimate their skills and abilities.

And speaking of bad drivers, just how bad are we? Of the top six causes of auto accidents, five are directly related to breakdowns in human behavior and responsibility.   Number one is distracted driving, which includes texting and cellphones, paying attention to scenery or other passengers,  eating, reading and fiddling with electronics.  These  together are responsible for up to half of all accidents.   Next is fatigue, then drunk driving, then speeding, and finally aggressive driving.   The sixth, by the way, is weather.

What about mechanical and electrical failure? Over time, it’s gotten harder and harder to blame mechanical and electrical failure for accidents, even as the systems themselves have become enormously more sophisticated.   Take brake failure, for example.   As brake systems have moved from drums to discs to ABS and stability control, the number of auto repair and warranty claims related to brake failure has decreased significantly.

And what about bad driving habits? To get a sense of the dangerous ways people drive cars, just glance over the comments posted to a recent New York Times story about possible government regulation that would require a brake override system, ostensibly in response to the spate of Toyota sudden acceleration claims.    The number of drivers who freely admit to (and defend) using the  “heel and toe” technique, or actually drive with two feet (one for the brake and one for the gas) is mind boggling.

These bare facts about the human inability to focus on a task and then accurately assess performance may lie at the heart of the sudden acceleration conundrum that has plagued the auto industry – Ford, Chrysler, GM, Audi, Honda and Toyota among others – for years.

But why can’t we openly discuss the possibility that sudden acceleration is just bad drivers driving badly? As others have noted, it would be tantamount to commercial suicide for auto companies to directly blame their customers.   They of course have to take the possibility of mechanical and electrical failure very seriously.    But they have to balance this with the need to fend of the ever increasing number of lawsuits based on heart-wrenching stories about near-misses and accidents that drivers (and their lawyers) swear were due to a car accelerating out of control.    And the fact is that such stories work in the court of public opinion, Congress and the actual courtroom.    The media,  politicians and the average juror tend equate anecdotes with evidence.

Another challenge to getting to the bottom of unintended acceleration is the tedious and counter-intuitive nature of the testing required to turn the correlation (”I was driving a Camry that ran out of control”) into causation (”a flaw in the acceleration system made the Camry run out of control”).   A recent exchange involving US Congresswoman Eleanor Norton during the Toyota hearings highlights the difficulty of explaining modern engineering methods to the uninitiated.   And finally, let’s not forget that humans in general and Americans in particular have a long and storied history of trying to find someone else – ideally a someone with very deep pockets – to blame when things go wrong.

I don’t know if bad driving is the cause of all cases of sudden acceleration. But it is likely to be a very significant component, given that bad driving is behind so many other incidents, accidents and deaths involving automobiles.   Occam’s razor – the idea that the explanation requiring the fewest  assumptions is likely the right one – would seem to point to driver error.    Indeed, recent reports of sudden acceleration recurring  after Toyota repairs could – again in the context of Occam’s trusty razor – be viewed as evidence that the problem is likely to lie with the driver (the one thing that wasn’t fixed in the repair).  But just how significant a component driver error is in sudden acceleration won’t be known unless we honestly and explicitly add it to the list of hypotheses that will be fairly tested against the evidence.

By the way, it looks like our earlier predictions that Toyota’s customer base wouldn’t abandon the car manufacturer as quickly and dramatically as many in the business blogosphere opined have held true.   We’re seeing a rebound in Toyota’s customer satisfaction ranking (as can be seen in the plot at the top of this post), and independent consumer surveys are showing that customers aren’t quite ready to abandon their 4Runners, Camrys and Priuses.

For more on how the most talked about companies on the Web – including Toyota – treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, visit Vanno.

Social Responsibility includes avoidance of controversial business, fair trade, good corporate governance, human rights and animal rights.  You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

The Environment  includes anti-pollution, recycling, clean & renewable energy, conservation, preservation, and sustainability.  You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

Some sanity is finally creeping to into the media free-for-all surrounding the Toyota accelerator and brake recalls.   Curiously, the piling-on seems to be continuing in the business pundit world, with one after another declaring the death of the Toyota brand.   Those with a better understanding of how consumers buy cars seem to be less apocalyptic. Edmunds.com, for example, analyzed National Traffic Safety Administration data over the last ten years and found that  Toyota had had 9.1% of all the complaints in the database, but 13.5% of the U.S. market.  That was good for 17 out of 20 (here a lower rank is better), bettered only by Mercedes, Porsche and Smart.   Compare Toyota to the worst brand on the list – Land Rover – which received 0.6% of the total complaints in the database, while its sales amounted to only 0.1% of all new cars sold in the United States.   Of course, anyone who drives by a Land Rover dealership on a Saturday morning already knows that.

As we pointed out in a recent post entitled Five Reasons why Toyota will be OK, people buy cars via comparison shopping.  Our most recent ranking of automobile companies (shown at the top of this post) still has Toyota on top.   Toyota’s overall reputation – including customer and employee satisfaction, community involvement, the environment and social responsibility – has dropped a bit recently, but has consistently tracked ahead of competitors like Honda, Ford and GM, as shown in the graph below.

That’s not to say the recalls involving floor mats, accelerator systems and hybrid brakes – coupled with and a slow and clumsy initial public response by Toyota senior management – haven’t taken a toll.   In the graph below, it’s clear that Toyota’s reputation for customer satisfaction – as reflected in online stories and commentary – has dropped significantly in recent weeks.   But notice that Honda has also seen a drop – most likely associated with their own recalls.   Ford is seen as having recovered somewhat in recent months after a bout of mis-association with the other American automakers involved in government bailouts.  And their reputation for customer satisfaction did NOT follow Toyota and Honda down in recent weeks.

For more on how the most talked-about companies online – including Toyota – treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, please visit Vanno.

Community Involvement includes charitable giving, support for the arts and education, volunteering and country or region of origin.  You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

1)  Toyota has a huge reservoir of consumer good will. The company regularly tops rankings – including ours – not only of automakers, but of the largest multi-nationals.   At Vanno, Toyota was the overall top overall company for a good fraction of 2009.  The recent acceleration and brake issues have obviously taken a toll – particularly relative to customer satisfaction, as the graphic shows – but the company is still in the overall top 10. The fact is that company reputations take time to build, and they are hard to destroy overnight or with one event.

2) Toyota’s reputation is strong across the board. Historically, Toyota ranks highly not only relative to customer satisfaction, but also community involvement, the environment and social responsibility.  Their weakest aspect of reputation – employee satisfaction – still is in the top 30 among the 250 companies we track.

3) Consumers respond well when companies say they are sorry and fix things quickly.   One of the most remarkable recent studies in consumer behavior involved doctors and patients, and the power of saying “I’m sorry”.   When doctors admitted errors and offered to quickly correct and/or compensate patients, the number of lawsuits filed by patients dropped considerably.    Similarly, when companies respond quickly and forcefully to negative events – like Kellogg did when some of its brands of peanut-butter crackers were found to be contaminated with salmonella – the negative impact on company reputation is short-lived.    If Toyota corrects the problems quickly and makes the appropriate public apologies, there is every reason to believe that consumers will respond favorably in the long term.

4) People buy cars via comparison shopping, and Toyota still compares very well to all other manufacturers. it is important to remember that sudden acceleration has been around for a long time, and has been primarily associated with  Chrysler and Ford before Toyota. More broadly viewed, consumers have relatively long memories and Toyota reliability has become the stuff of consumer lore.    As long as their products are priced competitively, and – as noted above – consumers believe a good-faith effort was made to correct the issues, it’s unlikely this one event will destroy a long and hard-earned reputation.

5) Most cases of sudden acceleration will turn out to be driver-related. When all is said and done, this is primarily an operator error issue.  There will likely be very few injuries or accidents that unambiguously involve actual mechanical/electrical failure.     The statistical reality is that many more people will die from reading, texting or tweeting about Toyota while driving around this week than ever will from any acceleration system flaws.

The big potential problem for Toyota is that every case of a driver unwittingly stepping on the gas at an inopportune time will now turn into a lawsuit.   It’s a well known phenomenon -  give something a name and widespread publicity – and associate it with deep-pocketed companies  – and complaints (and lawsuits) will come out of the woodwork.     Recall, for example, the long, convoluted and ongoing battle over vaccines and  autism.   When the (now thoroughly debunked) vaccine connection was made public, entirely new claims of autism started showing up everywhere, straining the very definition of the disease.   And, of course, lawsuits proliferated against every company in the vaccine food-chain.

For more on how Toyota treats its customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, visit Vanno.

You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

It’s been reported that during an informal chat with Apple employees, Steve Jobs described Google’s don’t-be-evil mantra as “bullshit” or ” a load of crap”.    While the tech press seems predictably focused on the distinction between the two characterizations, we asked ourselves whether Jobs in fact had a point.

A quick look at Google’s reputation scores on Vanno shows that social responsibility – which by our measure includes avoidance of controversial business, human rights and good governance among other factors – is in fact a weak point in the otherwise stellar reputation of the search and advertising giant.  Issues surrounding privacy (Streetview, health records), copyright (digital book projects), censorship (China until recently) and questionable business practices (behavioral advertising) have all been the subject of extensive online discussion.

By the way, for all Google’s flaws when it comes to social responsibility, Apple is the wrong company to throw the first stone.   They score lower than Google on this count.

Some of Apple’s social responsibility issues are similar to those that Google faces, such as censorship (Dalai Lama and the iPhone) and questionable business practices (DRM).   Other concerns have included manufacturing practices (silicon sweatshops) and corporate governance (refusal to report on sustainability efforts, lack of disclosure surrounding the health of CEO Steve Jobs and options back-dating).

You can learn more about how Google and Apple treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.

For those of you who were familiar with our free site, here’s what happened between then and now.   The free site relied on “crowdsourcing” to generate the raw material – stories, votes and comments – for our analysis.    While we count many serious and thoughtful people among the thousands of users of our free site, we discovered two things that led us to question the viability of a crowdsourced model for company reputations.

First is level of interest.    Surveys find that most consumers say they are very interested in how companies behave, but there is much recent evidence (independent of our experiences) that points to a big gap between sentiment and action.  Getting consistent and serious participation by a critical mass of engaged and informed online users on serious topics like company reputation is evidently non-trivial, and I suspect we’re not the first site to discover this truth.

Second is independence of voice.    As we’ve discussed in our blog and white papers, credible crowdsourcing requires that the opinions being collected are independent.    We discovered that user behavior was much more correlated, leading us to coin the phrase “mobsourcing” for much of what we were observing.   We suspect that most social media news and microblogging sites are in fact seeing  primarily mob behavior.   And the highly correlated nature of  “mobsourced” data greatly limits the ability to make reliable predictions and inferences.     We’ve found, in fact, that the most useful thing about social news and microblogging sites is that the mobs and influential users seem to point back to a rather consistent (and relatively small) set of primary sources of stories and commentary, particularly when it comes to companies.

So the bad news, then, is that crowdsourcing really doesn’t work for us because the online crowds are mostly mobs with ADD.    But there is much good news too.   First and foremost is the extent to which business people – particularly investors, consultants, marketing professionals and corporate executives – want more insight into the subjective aspects of company reputation that we track, and consider these insights to be a very valuable complement to financial performance data, particularly for larger companies whose behaviors are talked-about the most online.     And our experience with the online mobs and their ringleaders taught us how to find the sources that contained the stories and commentary that had the most influence on company reputations.   This allowed us to build an engine that collects and orders company-related online stories and commentary so that human editors can quickly and effectively assess the effect the stories and comments have on various aspects of company reputation.

So the result is the new Vanno:  a corporate reputation tracking service that follows the most talked about companies on the Web, and analyzes online stories and commentary to rank the top 250 companies based on how they treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general.

A final note about pricing.   This is a labor of love for us, but it’s also a business.   We struggled to find a reasonable price point, and concluded that we’d feel like we were doing something useful if a subscriber was willing to buy us a beer or a coffee once a week in return for our efforts.    That’s where the $9.95 a month came from, in case you’re wondering.

Identity Commerce LLC is re-launching Vanno as a subscription-only service.  The new site is scheduled to open on February 1, 2010.   The existing free site is no longer accessible.  All user personal information from the free site has been permanently deleted in accordance with our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

We thank you for your continued interest in Vanno.  We invite you to visit the new site after February 1, 2010 and sign up for a free trial subscription.   We believe you will find it more compelling and professionally valuable than ever before.  If you have any questions, please contact us at question@vanno.com.

We apologize for the delay in launching the new site, but we’ve been a bit distracted by the addition of a new member to the Vanno family.    Shaila David Clark was born on January 17, 2010.  She immediately moved to the top of our rankings.

Sincerely,

Nick, Landon and the Vanno Team