Does Toyota read Priuschat Forums?

Yep. Currently, it seems that Erica, the Prius product manager (in other words, a marketing person) is the main (only?) person who currently posts.

They (Prius Team) have talked about their presence, monitoring and use of consultants a few times before. I think it was Doug who posted about it though, the former Prius product manager.

Doug accidentally outed his other id at Big day ! | Page 2 | PriusChat.

I'd imagine that Danny and possibly the moderators might know of what and how many hits come from Toyota owned domains.

The thing is, I'm sure the engineering and development team is WAY ahead of us and any suggestions would have to come way before the vehicle is announced/shown to the public. There also could be legal ramifications about the source of the ideas.

 

My guess and it is only a guess:

US Marketing team is a definite yes
Japanese Engineering team, no.

 

Just to add, I know at least one major auto manufacturer has a group devoted to searching online content for references to the company and products, then filtering and sending important information to appropriate people in the corporation. They apparently have a war room of computer equipment and displays, subscriptions to blogs, feeds, forums, thousands of automated search results forwarded, you name it. If it gets indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, you can be sure someone at the company knows about it within minutes if it hits major keywords or tags, maybe hours or days otherwise. Whether or not the information any one of us thinks is important actually makes it to a decision maker at the company is another issue, of course.

I assume most of the other auto companies have similar setups. Other consumer products manufacturers might have just one person doing this, or perhaps their online marketing rep handles it as one of their duties.

 

I guess the important point is whether they actually ACT on what they read here, or not.

 

Within the limits of what can be done, they do. For example, about fifty Prius advocates not limited to just PriusChat participants, attended the January 2009, ZVW30 release in Detroit including Ken@Japan, a gentleman from Australia, and another from Europe.

All of us with our continued collaborations here and in other forums, seek to improve Toyota's Prius quality, presence, and penetration. We provide lines of communications, other eyes and voices, not readily found in Toyota organizations. It doesn't mean our 'hair brained schemes' will always be adopted but rather we know Toyota is not deaf.

Bob Wilson

 

I think when we all started complaining about the 5,000 mile OCI that made a difference. Shortly after that they sent out the adendum.