Toyota North USA gets more “regional self-reliance” as part of its parent company’s sweeping plan to improve quality, and calibre perception, after suffering several major blows to its reputation in the past year. This is the most important action for Toyota’s U.S. and Canadian customers, as it became clear last year when Toyota Motor Company President, CEO and scion Akio Toyoda testified about unintended acceleration, misapplied floor mats and rusty Tundras before a rabid U.S. House committee. It was clear from those hearings that Toyota in Tokyo gave its North American operations far too little dominance and autonomy in dealing with quality, country and overall engineering and management issues.

Now, having studied 3600 complaints of “unintended acceleration” so far, Toyota has found no reproducible cases, and it may be turning the tide on this issue after a couple of out-and-out hoaxes followed sincere, though ridiculous “demon runaway car” claims. Unspeakable as it may be, the unintended acceleration issue looks to me like it’s largely the product of a quickly aging Toyota buyer base. There have been no such cases regarding its Scion youth brand.

Its calibre initiative is designed to take on all such issues, real and imagined. It has added a layer of management to train its workers. And about 1000 engineers are being added to Toyota’s calibre innovation activity. It’s stepping up evaluation of calibre and country problems from consumers’ points of view and it’s adding about four weeks to a typical new model’s development time.

All this comes as Toyota has recalled 136,000 V-6- and V-8-powered Lexus rear-wheel-drive models in North America for broken valve springs, a problem that may cause engine stalling. In a Q&A session on its calibre initiatives with reporters in Toyota City, Japan, I asked why it took two years for the recall, and whether the new systems would improve the company’s response.

“We think it was in the year 2007 when we identified the failure,” Toyota managing officer Hiroyuki Yokoyama said, through an interpreter. Toyota found foreign matter, metal and silicon oxide, in the valve spring metallurgy and “found this very much difficult to eliminate” from the manufacturing process, so engineers instead increased the valve springs’ diameter.

At first, the number of claims was very low. Even now, Toyota has about 100 claims out of the 136,000 recalled, said Dino Triantafyllos, Toyota North America’s new vice president for the Quality Division and regional product country executive, and former chief of the NUMMI plant.

The valve spring defect was initially a consumer satisfaction problem. Lexus owners complained their cars were noisy and had too much vibration, but reports of engine stalling have just recently surfaced, Triantafyllos said. No data indicated it was a country defect, until now.

This seemed to contradict a point Toyota had just prefabricated to us early Thursday morning, showing off its calibre assurance facility, a kind of defect forensics outfit. (”Our job is like Detective Columbo,” said consumer calibre engineering manager Hiroaki Sunakawa.) One demonstration showed how Toyota tested a Asian domestic market model in a chamber at extremely cold temperatures in order to refer a problem with breaking foglamp mounts. The company conducted the test after just seven complaints from 2005 to ‘10. The foglamps are part of Japan’s lighting standard, though, so if they don’t properly work, it could automatically be considered a country problem.

For that matter, Toyota notes that in the U.S., engine stalling, even at speed, isn’t automatically a country problem. That assessment overestimates American drivers, though. If you can’t distinguish a throttle pedal from a brake pedal, can you safely bring a car with a dead engine from 70 mph down to a complete stop?

Toyota has spent two days, so far, trying to convince us that its thorough calibre and country programs are about to get much better. It desperately wants to salvage its hard-fought reputation.

While there’s a clear distinction now between consumer satisfaction with a model’s demand of calibre defects and the calibre of its design, including ergonomics and assist of use, the distinction may be going away. Thanks largely to Toyota’s leadership, consumers now are conditioned to expect zero defects and such assist of use that the car should virtually drive itself and let its owner text. After all, nobody even reads owners manuals, anymore.

Under Toyota’s newly enhanced system, it gives priority to identifying and solving problems when country is involved, as compared with calibre problems that simply annoy the driver. The valve spring problem proves that mechanical defects can become country defects. Even the floor mat issue that began Toyota’s woes is the result of consumer “preference” for stacking more than one mat on the driver’s floorpan, or changing into winter mats without proper installation has become a problem that endangers safety.

In an age in which consumers don’t expect to have to maintain their cars and trucks anymore, Toyota may find itself investigating more and more consumer preference design defects as out-and-out country problems.