Will Honda Avoid Brand Damage From Safety Recall?

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Perhaps that’s why Honda has been so reserved recently as General Motors, Ford, and Hyundai all have tried to take advantage of Toyota’s safety-recall woes by offering rebates directly to Toyota’s customers in the United States.

Honda, it turns out, has a major recall problem of its own, and the question now is: How long will the brand be able to avoid major damage?

So far, so good – sort of. Honda said last Friday that it would recall a total of 646,000 units of its Fit, Jazz, and City models globally, including 140,000 in the United States, because of a defective window switch that could cause a fire. In fact, two fires have been reported by American owners.

By itself, this would be major news: One of the global leaders in automotive quality suffering the embarrassment of having to launch a major recall. But Toyota’s quality, safety and brand-PR problems continued to mount in the meantime, dwarfing news of Honda’s own recall. It might even be fair to presume that Toyota’s out-of-control brand disaster had something to do with the timing of Honda’s own announcement.

In any event, Honda so far has chosen not to follow the path of other brands in the US market and tempt frustrated Toyota customers with special rebates. That might have been one reason Honda’s overall US sales in January, reported Tuesday, fell by 5 percent while many other major brands gained. However, there is a hint that Honda executives may simply be satisfied whistling through the graveyard on this one.

“Toyota is the front-runner representing Japanese cars," Honda Executive Vice President Koichi Kondo told reporters in Tokyo today. “In that sense, we’re somewhat worried that there may be a knock-on effect on other Japanese brands, but we’ll need a little more time to gauge any impact."

Sounds like Honda may be happy just lying low for a while.