how is it that the cheapest cars (Camry/accord) are the most reliable and longest lasting compared to luxury cars that cost more?
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Japanese manufacturers learned early on that if you put the time into items that are universal across multiple products like engines and HVAC systems you can have superior products in less expensive packages.
On top of that every person on the assembly line is empowered to make quality control decisions. Toyota would rather stop the presses and fix a problem before it leaves the factory than sell an inferior product.
2ldr they have very high quality control standards.
You need a large amount of data to detect reliability problems, and you need a large volume of production to justify engineering upgrades to fix those problems.
Suppose you have a part that fails once every 100 million miles driven. If you sell a model that only sells 10,000 vehicles and each vehicle only gets driven 10,000 miles a year, it might take you a full year to detect the problem. On the other hand, if you sell 1 million vehicles each year, it might only take you a week or so to detect the problem.
On the second point, if it takes $3 million in R&D to fix the problem, that increases the cost of the first model by $300 each but only increases the cost of the 2nd model by $3 each.
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