Safety sells — or so Toyota hopes. The carmaker will invest $50 million in what it has dubbed the Collaborative Safety Research Center, in Ann Arbor, Mich. — a facility the company says will work to improve vehicle design and address the much-discussed issue of driver distraction.
The timing of the announcement is less than coincidental. The Japanese giant, the world’s largest car manufacturer, is desperately struggling to reverse a series of setbacks related to the safety scandal that led it to recall more than 11 million vehicles in 2010, most of them in the United States. That has not only led to record fines but also a slump in sales that last year saw Toyota slip behind rival Ford in the U.S.for the first time in several years.
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