A lot of Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Honda, some of the brands with a reputation for the highest quality and longest lasting cars, have factories in the US… and they’re cheaper to buy than a lot of US comparable vehicles. Why can the US not figure out how to make a high quality car that is affordable and one that lasts as long as these other manufacturers?
In: Engineering
Answer: US manufacturing can make very reliable vehicles, just look at heavy trucks. They focus on other things like power to attract buyers instead.
They could. There isn’t as much profit to be made doing that.
Sell them a cheap car that lasts a long time?
Or sell them an expensive car that will need to be replaced in a “short” amount of time.
One of those makes your company more money. You could argue that people will just buy the better car once they know you are selling poor quality vehicles but… are they? Plenty of people still buy American despite knowing they are overpriced and of poor quality.
They are precisely engineered to be as reliable as necessary for maximum profit while costing as little as possible to produce.
> Can we not just reverse engineer a Toyota
GM kind of did exactly that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
> New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) was an American automobile manufacturing company in Fremont, California, jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota that opened in 1984 and closed in April 2010.
The two companies wanted to learn from each other:
> GM saw the joint venture as a way to get access to quality small cars[6] and an opportunity to learn about the Toyota Production System and The Toyota Way, a series of lean manufacturing and management philosophies that had made the company a leader in the automotive manufacturing and production industry.[9]
> …
> For Toyota, the factory gave the company its first manufacturing base in North America allowing it to avoid tariffs on imported vehicles[10] and saw GM as a partner that could show them how to navigate the American labor environment, particularly relations with the United Auto Workers union.[11]: 4, 10 [12][6]
It was a success for Toyota:
> Almost right away, the NUMMI factory was producing cars at the same speed as the Japanese factories and Corollas produced at NUMMI were judged to be equal in quality to those produced in Japan with a similar number of defects per 100 vehicles.[11]: 23 [5][6]
> …
> Toyota took the lessons it learned from NUMMI and went on to establish the wholly-owned Toyota Motor Manufacturing USA (later renamed Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plants in 1986, and by 2009 the company was operating a dozen manufacturing facilities in North America.[19]
But not really for GM, which was unable to implement what they learned anywhere else:
> GM executives, particularly CEO John F. Smith Jr., attempted to spread the Toyota Production System to other assembly plants,[18][21][22] but it proved largely unsuccessful. Despite having a front row seat to learn about the production system, by 1998 (15 years later) GM had still not been able to implement lean manufacturing in the rest of the United States,[6][23]
When I was shopping for a new car last year the exact equivalent Toyota was 20% more than the Ford. I am not sure if that is normal, but it makes me question whether the underlying notion that the Japanese cars cost less than the US cars is accurate. But assuming it is…
My understanding is that Toyota focuses on small incremental changes to their designs, while American car companies often wholly redesign components in a “big swing” attempt at making something that will leap ahead. But all too often these totally redesigned parts have issues, flaws, whatever. So then the inevitable recalls. Parts breaking at 120,000 miles instead of 220,000 miles.
Kind of funny this post suggests that American manufacturers reverse engineering a Toyota. That’s how Toyota produced their first vehicle: reverse engineering American automobiles.
Funny enough, I went to a place to get my 2007 Honda Accord a new paint job. Of the jobs they get that are just old cars where the paint has worn away and is in bad shape, he said they get a LOT of old Toyota and Honda cars, as well as older US trucks. The trucks are usually guys who are driving their 30 year old truck and just want to keep it up for ever (back in the day when trucks were for regular people). But the cars, the older Hondas and Toyotas, that’s because those cars can last 20-30 years and still drive well.
American reliability has gotten a lot better since the ‘80s. During that time the Japanese were eating their lunch and getting ready to tuck in for dinner. The car industry is very much “improve or get swept under”. It is a very competitive market.
It’s not a matter of engineering knowledge, but rather the system used to manufacture cars. After World War II Japanese auto manufacturers adopted modern management and workflow practices, while Detroit kept on using older practices.
This is a question with a lot of elements, but part of the answer is that an American guy named Deming invented a lot of modern quality control and the Japanese were much more receptive to his ideas than the Americans.
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