American cars have a long-standing history of not being as reliable/durable as Japanese cars, what keeps the US from being able to make quality cars? Can we not just reverse engineer a Toyota, or hire their top engineers for more money?

Question

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 1

> 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]