Toyota agreed today to recall an additional 2.17 million U.S. vehicles due to to floor-mat problems that could interfere with the accelerator pedal. The recall expands on already-known issues by adding new models and new causes to pedal interference.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations around Toyota.

Toyota conversation sentiment

Conversations around Toyota have been trending negative all day. Currently 70% of Toyota conversations are negative.

Toyota conversation topic cloud

Almost every major topic of conversation is red (negative). The word ‘recall’ is currently being mentioned in 55% of Toyota conversations online.

General Motors sentiment

On the other hand, two years after filing for bankruptcy protection, General Motors (GM) posted 2010 results that were its strongest annual performance in more than a decade and forecast further growth this year. GM earned $4.7 billion for the year, its first profit since 2004 and its best performance since 1999. GM chatter is currently 71% positive.

GM and Toyota are currently generating a similar amount of conversations overall. Will positive conversations around GM and negative conversations around Toyota reflect the sales numbers in the months ahead?

Toyota yesterday instructed 3.8 million vehicle owners to take the floor mats out of their cars, trucks and SUVs. This decision followed the deaths of four people in California in a recent crash involving a Lexus with a stuck accelerator pedal.

How did this announcement affect Toyota’s brand? We used Social Radar to research Toyota chatter.

First, we decided to pull a chart of positive, negative and conflicting Toyota chatter over September 29 and 30, just after the announcement.

Let’s also take a look at the context of Toyota’s chatter over September 29 and 30.

The data clearly shows that a large majority of this content is related to the floor mat recall. And, it’s almost entirely negative (as shown by the many topics highlighted in red). Additionally, most of the Toyota chatter was categorized by quality related mentions, which were highly negative.

We then decided to look at the positive and negative conversation trend (the green and red lines) correlating with conversation volume (the bars).

Toyota chatter was quite positive leading up to the announcement. Interestingly, Toyota chatter surged in negativity on September 30 but quickly shifted back to positive the very next day. This strong turnaround shows that people may be quickly forgiving Toyota and moving past this unforeseen mistake.