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
A Couple Reasons:
1. General Business Philosophy – On average Americans keep a new car for 8 years. So, that’s really only as long as American manufacturers need to design a car to last. Since that’s an average, a lot of folks keep a car for shorter periods of time. US automakers are most concerned with winning new buyers as they cycle through cars. Pay attention to the message of the commercials. Usually the focus is “check out the all new model of this US car”. or similar.
Japanese manufacturers are more concerned with owning a customer for life. IE, no matter how long I keep a Toyota, my next vehicle will be a Toyota. This is especially true with Subaru. They often run ads with the theme “look how long subaru lasted! I am sad to see it go but I will pass it down to my kids like an old shirt (because it still runs fine) while I enjoy my new subaru”
2. Manufacturing and Engineering Philosophy – Lean Manufacturing, The Toyota Way, etc. No matter what you call it the basic principal is an emphasis on striving for perfection in quality control. This is how many Japanese plants were designed from the start. They believe that putting out a defective product is more costly in the long run than stopping production now.
Many if not all American manufacturers have attempted to adopt these principles to some degree. But America just does not do it it as well as the Japanese. Also, Japanese cars (engines, transmissions especially) are often designed with the assumption that Americans will not do proper maintenance. Ever hear a story of a Toyota running fine with little or no oil? That’s why.
It’s important to note that the location of the factory usually has no impact. A Nissan plant in the US mostly follows the same principals as a Nissan factory in Japan.
There’s a story about Henry Ford examining the reports of failures and break downs in the model T and dertmining that there was one component that never failed and outlasted everything else. He decided that it was being made at a quality that was too high for purpose, so he ordered that it be made to a lesser, cheaper standard.
If you asked this on r/askengineers you’d get different answers. From an engineering perspective Toyota’s vehicles shouldn’t be any more reliable than Ford or GM; most of the reliability differences come in during manufacturing not design.
Lean manufacturing was invented by Japanese auto makers and put them far ahead of US companies. Lean in the US is often just the economic/physical side of things (not overstocking parts, reducing the number of parts, reusing components in multiple places instead of having unique parts everywhere) but there is also a people/culture side of Lean that Japan has ingrained while the US struggles to adapt.
It’s easy to make 1 of something and it’s really, really hard to make 100,000 of anything. It’s not an engineering or technology problem; head to head in an endurance test, US auto makers probably could make a one-off vehicle that far outlives anything Japanese companies could produce. But when they try to make 100,000 vehicles, Japanese manufacturing culture puts them ahead.
I’m a design engineer at a 2nd tier auto supplier. We absolutely CAN make reliable cars. The short answer is *profits*. Why make a 90% reliable vehicle with a 40% profit when you can make a 60% reliable car with the same profit for less money?
Don’t blame the engineers. Blame the greedy CEOs, business strategists, and design directors for this mentality
I retired from a Toyota plant in the US just over 2 years ago.
In our training when I was hired, they told us that Big 3 companies decided how many cars they were going to make per month or per year and that’s what they did. They have cars sitting in the yards just waiting to be ordered by the dealer.
Toyotas projects what the dealers are going to want and give each plant the number of cars to build every month. It is up to the plant how they get this done but at the end of the month they are going to be darned close to, or slightly over the number given them.
I saw this in my time there. First of the month, we were told how many cars were going to be built each shift. If we had a breakdown, parts shortage, or other issues that interrupted production, we worked overtime that day and every day until those cars were made up. If something happened near the end of the month and we didn’t get our numbers, we heard about and we continued with the OT until it was met. But we saw our numbers change often based on lots of factors, including the economy.
The last 15 years there I worked on the docks unloading parts and delivering them to the lines so I directly saw how lean manufacturing works. We did not warehouse parts (inventory cost). The parts did come in ahead of time, there was some small buffering time. But everything we did on the dock was based on the lines running and cars moving, when they stopped working we did too.
Our management could track parts from the supplier to the cross dock to us. They knew where every trailer was at and exactly which parts were on it. They could call the cross dock to get a future trailer delivered so we could get a certain part from it. The supplier was notified so they could send extras to make that up eventually. I have been directed to be on my forklift at the dock door to wait for parts that had been air expedited from Japan, unloading them as soon as the dock plate we down because the whole line was stopped.
When the big tsunami hit Japan maybe 10 years ago we heard that some of the suppliers had actually be wiped from the face of the earth. We ran about 6 months before we started to see serious shortages but then they lasted for a long while. Same with Covid, we shut down for 7 weeks and some of our suppliers even longer. When everyone was up & running again the supply chain issues hit.
Quality was also a big deal, if we had a defect we had to sit with a team leader or group leader to come up with (in writing) a countermeasure that was passed to management. If we had another defect we had better be implementing that previous countermeasure or we had better have a good reason why. Three defects in a year, you got to “meet” one of the upper level managers.
I think Big3 has made some quality cars over the years, perhaps their biggest issue is they don’t ever want to see change. Toyota has always rolled with the flow, changing whatever was needed to keep business running good.
Please don’t think I am all pro-Toyota, to me it was a job that provided for my needs. A lot of the changes they were constantly making made the grunt employees lives less enjoyable, but I never, ever worried about losing my job. We were not union and I never wanted to be, we never had to worry about contracts and strikes and not getting paid and layoffs. We had great pay & benefits, including my retirement. But my wife & I drove a Hyundai & a f150.
It mainly comes down to culture differences and how different manufacturers prioritizes different things. The recent story that comes to mind is the development of the latest Toyota Supra, it’s not Japanese and US, but the comparison does show how the culture differences reflect in the end product
[Here’s an article on it](https://jalopnik.com/how-bmw-and-toyota-overcame-a-culture-clash-to-design-t-1827831415)
in essence, BMW wanted to work with Toyota. A good BMW can be pretty damned reliable but the star of the show is how they drive, not much can match the full package it can offer. And a good Toyota, as the history goes, is bulletproof.
They were both surprised at essentially how good each other was at what they did. Toyota was amazed at the seemingly infinite budget BMW had for R&D, the amount of simulations and diagrams and man-hours thrown at every aspect of car design and tuning.
And on the flipside, BMW were amazed at the quality control lengths that Toyota went through and their efficiency. Every part and fastener sent to Japan for multiple tests and analysis at Toyota.
They were both normal things that each respective company did when designing a car but when they looked at each other they both went “Wow, you put THAT much effort into that department”
And the last tidbit from the engineer does sum it up nicely. BMW design their “package” first. What’s the car going to have in it, when we have that we’ll make a car around that package. “We’ve made this drivetrain with these features and this interior, let’s wrap it up in a car shell”
The problem with American cars is not with the design of the cars, but the process we use to make them.
You can use “defects per hundred car” as a way to measure quality, and there is *nothing* you can learn from examining an individual Toyota car which will teach you how to decrease the number of defects per hundred fords.
The process which Toyota uses to make cars encourages workers to feel proud of their work, and also involves the workers and managers being friendly with each other.
American business owners think workers and managers being friendly is utterly alien and nonsensical and stupid.
You might respond “if its stupid but it works, it’s not actually stupid,” but business owners are stubborn in strange ways.
Weirdos!
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