Why do Japanese cars have a reputation for being so much more reliable than their American or Euro counterparts?
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There’s an anecdote about Ford visiting a production line in Japan.
In the American production lines they had people with rubber mallets that would “adjust” the doors to fit as the cars rolled off. The Japanese production lines didn’t have these people and the doors for perfectly.
When asked why they didn’t need the adjusters, the Japanese explained that they got it right at the design stage and made sure it was right the whole way through.
That’s a very typical Japanese cultural concept.
The anecdote is in Malcolm Gladwells book “The Tipping Point”
Broadly speaking, Japanese workers apply great care to their craft, and take pride in it. You have to try pretty hard to find a bad meal in Japan. Road work is completed much more thoroughly and quickly. Trains almost always arrive on time; if a train is late by mere minutes, the conductor offers a sincere apology. The packaging of items is meticulous. Handcrafted items have great fit and finish.
The large Japanese auto manufacturers apply the same attention to detail to the design and engineering of their vehicles.
It’s not really “Japan” as much as Toyota.
Toyota basically (but not quite literally) invented the current manufacturing methodology that the whole world uses in virtually every industry.
Just-In-Time Manufacturing.
The idea that the next part of the manufacturing process shouldn’t begin until the step preceding it is finished. Items are created to meet demand only. They aren’t made ahead of time.
Toyota did this for tons of reasons but one of the main reasons was quality control. Small batches mean that problems are fixed as they’re caught and adjustments are made much more frequently. Leading to fewer negatively impacted batches and overall higher vehicle quality.
Also, Toyota has more annual miles driven on their cars than most other manufacturers combined. That gives you a lot if data to work with as an engineer. And that’s why Toyota has some of, if not *the* best cars in the world. (more specifically Lexus, but you probably get my point)
its arguably a matter of designers attention and car culture.
Americans car culture often romanticizes cars as a Symbol of Personal Freedom, of being a measure of a man, etc. Their was an expectation that “a Real Man ™” has a general level of mechanical knowledge and is capable of hand tool repairs or maintenance (think of how in most car movies, you see the hero with a wrench in hand, tweaking some bolt on a engine block, etc). They also motorised much earlier than everyone else, and interwar/early postwar cars needed a lot more operator maintenance to keep running, which fed into the expectations of both car makers and drivers that the driver would need to do maintenance to keep it running. what people prized was stuff like aesthetics, and performance, which lead to the 60s muscle cars with enormous engines and such.
to the Japanese…a car is a box you use to travel in. It doesn’t have the same cultural connotations, and drivers generally didn’t have the same mechanical backgrounds, so reliability was placed much higher up the priority list for designers. In short, they designed their cars for “non car” people.
Bear in mind this is in reference to comparative cars of the 70s and 80s, when the Japanese cars gained this reputation. Modern western cars are not notably less reliable than Japanese ones these days.
Because they were for many years. From about 1975 till at least 1990, the build quality and defect rates were objectively better in the Japanese made cars.
There are a lot of reasons for that, and in my opinion, it boils down to Japan’s destitution in the aftermath of World War II. Japanese manufacturers, by necessity, became obsessed with efficiency in all aspects of the manufacturing process. No resources to keep a back stock of parts? JIT! Decimated labor force? Lean that process! No money for a wide array of tools? Design it so a 10mm is the only wrench you need!
End result: Quality! JIT drives deliberate parts selection and sourcing from only the most reliable vendors. Lean processes not only save on labor, but have fewer steps for a human to fuck up. Designing for ease of maintenance entails simplifying otherwise complex systems; simple systems fail less.
When I was a kid, Japanese cars were just becoming a thing and National Geographic did an issue on them. One picture that I’ll never forget is a Japanese QC engineer with a wax pencil going over an American built car, looking for things that wouldn’t pass their inspection. It was covered in red circles.
They were notably better until about 20 years ago. And 50 years ago they were A LOT better. Now-a-days most Japanese cars sold in the US are designed specifically for the US and have a lot of the manufacturing done in the US south. Also, automation is more widely used, and techniques the japanese developed in the 60s and 70s have been adopted in all industries all over the world. The quality of all cars, whoever makes them, are a lot higher than they were in say the 1980s; so believe it or not, it kinda matters less.
They are designed and built to last for at least 250,000 miles, in good shape. American cars, not so much. They’re better than they used to be, but no one builds cars like the Japanese.
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