Mazda Destroys New Cars for Customer's Sake

According to this video report by The Wall Street Journal, Mazda is destroying 4,700 brand new Mazda vehicles in order to prevent them from getting into the hands of customers. The report makes no mention of the cost of this action, but conservatively it's got to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Watch the video and you'll understand why. The short story: all of these vehicles were aboard a ship called the "Cougar Ace" that set sail from Japan in the summer of 2006. Something happened and ship listed badly over to one side and lay that way in the water for several weeks until it could be righted and towed back into the closest harbor. But now the question for Mazda: what to do with the 4,700 cars on board that were either definitely or presumably damaged? Inspect, repair, and sell them as new? (they had, after all, never been driven).

Mazda decided that they "couldn't run the risk of these vehicles getting into the retail stream...and risk damaging the brand that Mazda had worked so hard over the years to develop." So the entire lot was sent to be shredded by Shitzu Steel Co.

Mazda gets it: the brand and the customer experience are inseparable. They made the short-run expensive decision to protect the long-run revenue stream that flows from positive customer experience with the brand.