The honeymoon is over

[polka_king]

I grew up working on Toyotas. When they were mechanically simple vehicles they were amazing. Toyota mastered engineering simple mechanical systems. Their electrical control systems were also very good. They almost always found the best and simplest solution to any engineering challenge. They were never afraid to eat legacy engineering costs

Comments

[polka_king]

Toyota will come out of this very well. The biggest reason for that is because people trust Toyota. They believe that the company really cares about them. One of the largest mistakes domestic automakers ever made was to be arrogant toward their customers. When GM made half of all the cars in America they could afford a little bit of arrogance. The long-term effect of that is that if GM recalls 5000 Pontiacs for a bad heater control switch people see it as proof that Americans can't build a decent car. When Toyotas are charging out of control and killing people the perception is very different: Toyota still builds a quality product but they sometimes have small problems. Toyota gets the benefit of the doubt because of their years of very good products and their attentive corporate culture. Their customer-focused dealers are a big asset also.

Quality is much better at the Big Three now than it was when they turned their back on Deming. I read an excerpt from a book by a former Ford transmission plant manager. He was building the infamous C4 transmission at his plant in Michigan. His own quality control staff rejected every single torque converter the plant built during their production run. The corporate managers needed C4 transmissions for their passenger cars and ordered the factory to knowingly assemble faulty transmissions which would be dealt with sometime after the sale. NHTSA ended up requiring the recall of EVERY Ford built with a C4 transmission. Such was the arrogance of domestic manufacturers at the time.

Now things have improved a lot. Ford, GM and Chrysler need to bridge the "perception gap" that their years of arrogance created. Part of that is being addressed by Toyota going through the difficult process of recalling cars. At least Toyota, despite being reluctant to recall the cars, is handling this in a forthright manner. They are not blaming drivers; they are taking it seriously and being honest with consumers. In the long run they won't be seriously hurt by this. They will lose a few sales in 2010 but I expect that they'll be back in their position of market leadership by 2011.