Large amounts of spare parts made? Manufacturing process? Design differences?
In: Technology
>Manufacturing process? Design differences
TL;DR: These.
Specifically, how they approach designing the vehicle and it’s components, and the requirements for manufacturing the parts.
They design a vehicle that’s as basic as they can get away with. Many non-luxury Japanese vehicles don’t have some bells and whistles that other manufacturers add, and they make the same designs for years, refining it as they go (other companies do this too, I can think of a Ford V6 that’s had variations put in the Ranger, Explorer, and Mustang for years).
Then the parts are manufactured to tighter tolerances than other manufacturers bother with. Toyota recently teamed up with BMW on a sports car, and reportedly BMW people were shocked by the high quality assurance Toyota’s people insisted on.
This isn’t an absolute. There are a couple Japanese brands that don’t quite have the reputation Toyota or Honda do. There are a couple European brands that have reputations for being quite reliable, contrasting other Euro nameplates. You can find extremely reliable examples of any brands vehicles, and you can find lemon Hondas. Heck they had an issue with a certain CRV engines and cold starts/short trips recently.
Luckily most modern cars are very reliable compared to even twenty years ago, and cars of the 2000’s and 2010’s were much better than cars of the 1980’s (which is partly why the used car market is so strong right now). Takeaway message for buyers: do a little research and decide if you can live with the possibility of one or more of the common issues (they all seem to have *something*), the car you’re interested in might develop, on the slim chance it develops a problem at all.
*Edit:* please forgive typos, am on mobile and am tired.
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