Toyota finally getting called out

[Adamgp]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33192916/ns/business-the_drivers_seat/

Click link for story. To big to copy and paste in here.

It's all about their famous Toyota quality taking a dive in recent years.

 

[Jim Prower]

And this is supposed to be one of the Kings of Lean Manufacturing and Quality Control. From what I'm seeing, too, their competitors are catching up, meaning that Toyota is quickly losing the one competitive advantage they've long held. Caterpillar, even, uses the Toyota Production System...or is supposed to...and it wouldn't strike me as odd if the Big three weren't trying to implement it all along, even if in a halfassed way.

The word shouldn't be "Productivity," either, but "Low-waste," meaning fewer products are sent for rework or scrap.

The FT-86 had better be a pure driver. Toyota needs passion.

 

[yeti]

I'd still buy a japanese car over an American one...

C.

 

[homeforsummer]

I suspect it depends on which Toyota you get too. Probably brand new ones are pretty pants, but some of the big off-roaders are built like tanks.

 

[Jondot]

I'm sorry, but this was just too perfect...

Company President Akio Toyoda, the scion of the founding family who took over this year in a management shake-up...

 

[High-Test]

I'm sorry, but this was just too perfect...

Indeed. Frankly, I'm not sure that the FT-86 can redeem them in my eyes. They've taken everything that was good about motoring, painted it beige, and made it bulbous.

The Big Three got what had been coming to them, and I think they've finally learned their lesson. I hope Subaru doesn't sell their soul.

 

[YSSMAN]

Well, I've been saying for a while that Toyota was getting too big, too fast. The (new) Tundra has been an absolute disaster from day one for the company, totally emblematic of the sort of problems that had plagued GM and the like when they were "in their prime" and essentially controlled the market. Given the resurgence of competition from American and European brands, not to mention having the Koreans attempting to out-Japan the Japanese marques... Its only a matter of time before Toyota falls back off the top of the list as the "#1 Auto Company in the World."

 

[Tornado]

The Big Three got what had been coming to them, and I think they've finally learned their lesson. I hope Subaru doesn't sell their soul.

Too late for that.

 

[sumbrownkid]

Toyota built its reputation of a solid car so well in the 70's and onward that I think the public at large will still think a Toyota will outlast anything else.

But their overall philosophy of "boring and bland" needs to go. Hopefully the FT-86 will change that for the better.

 

[red70mach1]

Meeting demand vs. quality control. It has been an issue in recent years and now they're paying the price. They got knocked off balance.

 

[Northstar]

I suspect it depends on which Toyota you get too. Probably brand new ones are pretty pants, but some of the big off-roaders are built like tanks.

Normally any truck/suv is built better as they are designed to take more abuse.

 

[arvin charles]

Toyota built its reputation of a solid car so well in the 70's and onward that I think the public at large will still think a Toyota will outlast anything else.

But their overall philosophy of "boring and bland" needs to go. Hopefully the FT-86 will change that for the better.

Not really. My family is a Toyota family (not me though) with 2 2001 Corolla S, a '91 Corolla, a Solara, a Corolla GTS & had an '85 Celica, a '88 Corolla and a '86 Cressida. The new ones from the 2000s suck. Their interior build quality is crap & pieces of plastic are falling apart after just 8 years of normal use. My mom has had 4 CEL lights on her S.

I've personally seen Toyota's quality go down. I have not been impressed by their recent products at all.

 

[sumbrownkid]

^Really? My friend's family are all Toyota owners I swore their camry and corolla refuse to die (they are 1994 year models I think). My family along with his refuse to buy anything other than Toyota or something Japanese. Then again, we are Indian.

 

[arvin charles]

^Their 80s & 90s cars have served my family really well. The new ones just haven't been as solid as we've come to expect them to be.

Of course, I don't know how their products from the past 4 years have been holding up, but the ones we bought in the early 2000s haven't been as good.

My family is Asian, so 99% of the time (with me being the only exception), the car purchase would be Japanese...But the if anyone in my family buys new again, I'm sure we might go with Honda.

 

[Omnis]

The one thing that definitely doesn't last on a Toyota is the paintjob.

 

[YSSMAN]

Too late for that.

The LULZ go back further when you think about who used to own Subaru before running for the hills.

 

[Jim Prower]

Meeting demand vs. quality control. It has been an issue in recent years and now they're paying the price. They got knocked off balance.

Interesting. I mean, I've studied Toyota's production system in detail, and I still don't get why a company who does this would send thousands of products out the back door with problems.

I mean, you've got seven wastes, an eighth which was added by other companies

Defects - quality niggles.
Overproduction - Producing too many of anything so that you can cover a spike in demand.
Waiting - When one station is finished with a product, and the previous station isn't ready, OR when there's a backlog of products at one station.
Transportation - both in and out of a plant, this should be minimized.
Inventory - Best inventory is NO inventory.
Motion - A worker shouldn't have to move around too much to get his job done.
Extra processing - Rework of defects, activities that don't add value to the product.

Unused talents - Not originally used by Toyota, means that everyone's ideas to improve the line, from shop floor to CEO, are important.

These are the fundamentals of Lean...However, could Toyota be becoming so busy that they've started to forget these things they created?

 

[homeforsummer]

The one thing that definitely doesn't last on a Toyota is the paintjob.

Paint has been an issue on many Japanese cars until recently. When I was looking for second-hand cars virtually all of the Japanese 80s and 90s cars I looked at had flaking laquer and fading paint when European cars from the same period looked fine.

Sounds like Toyota are doing a late 90s/early 00s Mercedes. Hopefully their quality will begin to improve again just like Merc have made an effort to do.

 

[Paulie]

Oh the irony, the old saying "This world aint big enough for the 2 of us", well, it seems the world is too big for any one manufacturer. Rather than one manufacturer trying to dominate, for quality to be upheld it seems every manufacturer needs to be smaller and share the light with others. Share or go up in flames.

 

[Pupik]

Let me say that I do not work for Toyota anymore, but I do drive -- and have driven -- their products.

There was nothing in the article stating exactly what was wrong with any of the cars. A recall here and a couple of people pissed off about a 7-8 year old product? Somehow this is all woeful and dangerous? Some mere speculation about crash worthiness? Give me a break.

The recall has been discussed, and one high-profile incident is making a whole stink of the of this matter. Did anyone mention that they were driving an unfamiliar loaner car? Or that maybe they did not know what to do in a panic situation? No, they did not.

The condition of the exterior is kept up by the owner, and any car can look like crap after a few years if its exterior is left unmaintained for years on end. Owners who take pride in their cars usually clean them, or at least, pay someone to do it for them. For most owners, that's still a small percentage when the car ages.

My present car has had no issues in the past 4 months; one clicking noise which was immediately solved with a 10 minute re-adjustment of a door panel...on a $15K car.

This is why I despise imbalanced journalism.

 

[ANFD]

Toyota played a large part in the destruction of open wheel racing in this country when they secretly (behind closed doors) convinced the CART management (read .... paid big bucks) to switch from the standard turbo engine package to the normally aspirated engine that they had already been working on for 2 years in order to give them the advantage they needed to finally be competitive with the other engine manufacturers at the time. All the other brands pulled out as a result, including Ford, Mercedes and Honda. The CART brass quickly changed their minds and recinded the rules change but by then, the damage had been done.

I like to think of it as Toyota's CARMA has finally caught up with them

 

[Bram Turismo]

To me this is all just heaps of crap. Once again, all the complainments seem to come from the American side. I guess the American Toyotas just aren't as good as the European ones. Just because an American Toyota isn't as good as the European one, doesn't much Toyota in general is a bad car to drive. I'm not sure on the figures everywhere in Europe, but here in Norway Toyota has been topping the tables for years. Only the last 2 years has it recieved competition from BMW and VW, but Toyota scores so consistent that a Toyota-purchase is a near given when looking for a new car over here.

 

[YSSMAN]

Well, when your brand-new Tundra looks like this underneath...

...After only a year or so of ownership. Wow. Where was the quality control on that? Apparently it wasn't just the Tundra, but the Tacoma as well. That is a GM-style problem that I'd never have expected to see from Toyota.

 

[Jim Prower]

Shixt. That looks like my 21-year-old Eight-two!

I wouldn't have expected that, either. Perhaps the Engineers have been forced to spec lower-quality steel.

 

[Bram Turismo]

I refuse to believe that the chassis looks like that after one year untill I've got some solid evidence the user treated it normally and not in an abusing way. The state of that chassis looks far worse than a 10-year old car from the '90s, so no way I'm believing that's the chassis of a brand-new Thundra.

 

[Philly]

To me this is all just heaps of crap. Once again, all the complainments seem to come from the American side. I guess the American Toyotas just aren't as good as the European ones. Just because an American Toyota isn't as good as the European one, doesn't much Toyota in general is a bad car to drive. I'm not sure on the figures everywhere in Europe, but here in Norway Toyota has been topping the tables for years. Only the last 2 years has it recieved competition from BMW and VW, but Toyota scores so consistent that a Toyota-purchase is a near given when looking for a new car over here.

That's the case for a lot of cars, though. European factories seem to produce better results than a lot of the other regions. Volkswagen, for example. My car was built in Germany and is a pretty quality product. But the Mexican VWs just aren't as good. It wouldn't surprise me if the Toyotas built in American just weren't as well put together as the Toyotas built elsewhere.

It also helps that Europeans have a higher standard of quality than the Americans, so cars there have to be better to compete. Everybody here looks at Toyotas as simply "cars that work and are reliable," so until the quality starts dropping considerably, no one will really care, and then suddenly it'll be an issue as quality outweighs the reputation for reliable transport.

 

[homeforsummer]

It also helps that Europeans have a higher standard of quality than the Americans, so cars there have to be better to compete. Everybody here looks at Toyotas as simply "cars that work and are reliable," so until the quality starts dropping considerably, no one will really care, and then suddenly it'll be an issue as quality outweighs the reputation for reliable transport.

I'm not so sure about this bit. I'd always suspected it was the other way around, given that when you buy from a dealership in the States you get huge warranties when we sometimes get as little as two years over here. I'd always suspected it was an American consumerism thing, where you guys take a hell of a lot less crap from companies (i.e, you sue their asses off) so they go out of their way to offer big warranties and I wouldn't expect any company with no faith in it's products to put that much effort into aftersales.

It's only really recently where companies (especially French and Italian ones) over here have made a big push with quality, aftersales and reliability and lo and behold companies like Fiat are suddenly starting to appear at the top of customer satisfaction and reliability surveys. You're aware of the reputation French and Italian cars have in the States and how quickly they left - surely if the big three had been that bad they would have been in their current mess long ago.

 

[Tornado]

I refuse to believe that the chassis looks like that after one year untill I've got some solid evidence the user treated it normally and not in an abusing way.

In a year of ownership it shouldn't be possible to make a chassis look that bad (yes, I know it is, but the lengths one would have to go would have the vehicle flagged as such), so at the very least there had to be a defect on that individual vehicle.

 

[sumbrownkid]

I'm not so sure about this bit. I'd always suspected it was the other way around, given that when you buy from a dealership in the States you get huge warranties when we sometimes get as little as two years over here. I'd always suspected it was an American consumerism thing, where you guys take a hell of a lot less crap from companies (i.e, you sue their asses off) so they go out of their way to offer big warranties and I wouldn't expect any company with no faith in it's products to put that much effort into aftersales.

It's only really recently where companies (especially French and Italian ones) over here have made a big push with quality, aftersales and reliability and lo and behold companies like Fiat are suddenly starting to appear at the top of customer satisfaction and reliability surveys. You're aware of the reputation French and Italian cars have in the States and how quickly they left - surely if the big three had been that bad they would have been in their current mess long ago.

I think our desire for huge warranty periods and reliability here in the states is because we do a lot of driving compared to Europe. Our average driving distance to the job from home is quite long.

 

[Omnis]

Well, when your brand-new Tundra looks like this underneath...

...After only a year or so of ownership. Wow. Where was the quality control on that? Apparently it wasn't just the Tundra, but the Tacoma as well. That is a GM-style problem that I'd never have expected to see from Toyota.

Jesus. Glad I never bought a Toyota truck. Looks like they spent more money on their commercials than their vehicles.