Toyota President Akio Toyoda yesterday admitted that the car manufacturer had ”pursued growth” above safety.

His sensational statement follows a string of major problems across a range of Toyota vehicles, which has led to the global recall of 8.5 million cars - and the worldwide battering of his company’s reputation.

Meanwhile Jim Lentz, President of Toyota’s US operations, has confessed that it took “too long to come to grips with a rare, but serious set of safety issues.”

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for the Japanese car giant and the media are already beginning to question if the company is now fighting a losing battle.

At the heart of Toyota’s reputational meltdown is its delay in identifying and addressing issues in the first place. Whatever the world’s largest car maker says and does now, there is a sense that it ignored problems until it was forced to take action.

The best crisis PR takes place at the first whiff of a problem. Senior management and PROs – indeed all employees – should be ever alert to potential threats and crises and then plan their way out of them or around them with urgent action, long before the proverbial brown stuff hits the fan.

Mr Toyoda, grandson of Toyota’s founder, will today apologise to the US Congress and the millions of Toyota owners for his firm’s failings, but is it already the end of the road for Toyota?