Cripes. I drive a 2002 Toyota Camry, which I bought new off the lot. I’ve driven all 85,000 miles of it and I think I’ve had to bring it to the shop once, for a tweak on the brakes. Oh, there was that time it had to be fixed when our house painters dropped a ladder on it. Oops. Then there was that time when my neighbor side-swiped me in our shared driveway at our old house. Oops. But those weren’t mechanical failures. Of course, I bring it in every 5-6K miles for scheduled service and I’d like to think that’s helped with why I’ve had so little problems with it.

This recall, though, has so quickly spun Toyota from golden boys to rust faster than you can say “GM in the eighties.” It has turned the car industry on its heels! Suddenly it’s A-OK to buy American and Toyota will KILL you! Can you imagine saying that even one year ago?

My car is NOT on the recall list. But with all these stories coming out about how Toyota secretly danced around the fire on its production snafus and how they wiggled out of them, I find myself wondering what’s going on under my hood? Should I ditch the car? I paid it off in 2005 for god’s sake! I’ve been enjoying no payments and clean bills of health on it for almost five years now! But who knows?! And why should I even take .0005% risk when I have two precious boys often riding sidecar with me? Now that I’ll be driving to work every day soon, should I bite the bullet and get something else? It’s horrifying. It’s like the sweet girl from next door gets popped for robbing banks and selling heroin.

Then I read this, from this morning’s Boston Globe. Are there more out there that haven’t been recalled yet? I kinda think there are and that Toyota is just going to stretch out the recalls so the shit doesn’t hit the fan all at once for them. Who can you trust? What would you do?