Second, there's a difference between a subsidy and loans. GM and Chrysler got loans. Now, they were loans they couldn't have gotten on the open market because they looked too toxic. However, GM is now saying they'll be able to repay the loan pretty quickly. That indicates that investors misjudged the risk. Granted, it could have turned out otherwise (and I was one of the people that thought that it would have).
And I think that people feel betrayed if a company has a potentially fatal flaw in their devices. This isn't an issue of mere reliability. If my car is unreliable, it's annoying and I have higher repair bills. If my car speeds up to 100MPH and I can't stop it, I can die. Those two things sit differently with consumers. And it looks like Toyota tried to write it off as nothing when it was something and tried to protect their image rather than their customers lives.
It's one of those things: if a company has produced a wonderful, superior, reliable vehicle that kills 1 in 100,000, are they better? Most would say no, but it's easier to hide and it looks like Toyota was trying to hide their problems.
Toyota isn't failed, but this will be a huge setback for them (and it should be). If you hide problems that are fatal to people, you deserve to have your sales drop. There's an outrage over that.
Toyota screwed up big time for many years. The US auto makers also screwed up for many years. The US auto makers troubles came to light slowly in a way that was mostly about finances, wages, etc. Toyota's screw up is about human fatalities and came to light very quickly. That's a lot of the difference in the way it's being treated by the media.