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Wow..... What's the matter with you dude? Why do you get so rude and personal? It's uncalled for.....
Did you not read previous posts? The one that gets personal and rude every time is the one with the junior high screenname AND maturity and intelect to go along with it. "crafty" use of dialect like "nuthugger".
Did you not read previous posts? The one that gets personal and rude every time is the one with the junior high screenname AND maturity and intelect to go along with it. "crafty" use of dialect like "nuthugger".
Yep.... I just read the previous posts and you are spot on! He, too, is very rude and out of line... All of this kindergarten BS on here, name calling etc.. is uncalled for and is frankly redicilous!
Through the years, it seems to me that these 2 always get rude, condecending and personal when folks don't agree with them...
I admit I do get rude. I am just being blunt with my opinions. Sorry if people don't agree with them but they are my opinions. I get annoyed when I see people say I will only buy "xx" manufacturer, they are all better.
All manufacturers make good and crap cars. I prefer to focus on certain models and drivetrain configurations that have been proven over years.
Also my screename is very juvenile, it was made to tease a friend of mine years ago that had a mustang. I just use it everywhere. To get more I ironic I used it on mustang message boards when I owned my Mustang. LOL.
Toyotas may be reliable but to me they are very boring. I liked Toyota in the 90's but have not really been into them since. I have a couple of friends that love their Toyotas but their interiors seem very cheap....a lot of that hard plastic. If you want a reliable car thats good on gas Toyota is probably a good choice but unless its from the 90's I would not own one.
I have two Toyotas now, a 2011 and a 2007. One at 39K, the other at 90K. Same history as the ones I had in the 90's. Brake pads and rotors fine (the '07 is almost due), no mechanical issues at all. They aren't the most exciting cars to drive, commuter four doors rarely are. But for the purpose they are designed for, they delivered.
My friends that own Fords and GM are basically in the same boat, as far as having boring commuter cars. I like my friend's Fusion better driving-wise than my Camry, but I like my engine and trans better. He's due for pads pretty soon.
I do not like knowing my mechanics first name, I don't like downtime. I know people that have Audis and BMW's, and I couldn't put up with that crap. Nice cars though. I used to love cars before they got crazy expensive. I drive way too many miles to screw around with cheap parts or exotic cars. Since that defines a large part of the market, the sales trends are understandable.
I try to limit the amount of electronic gizmos on my car, I choose my Tom Tom over vastly inferior factory screens. It's a car, it's quiet, comfortable, and I see my dealer mainly for an oil change. My car maintenance and repair bills since my first Camry in 1994 have been so low I don't budget for them. It's been the same experience for 18 years, and I'm very hesitant to change because some slick new cars comes along with a gee-wiz dash and vibrating seats.
I'd say they Became keen on it. This is due to a company becoming large enough, where central control loses their command they once had. I agree on many of your assertions, probably spot on.
In Toyota's case it was actually an edict from "central control" that caused the company to lose their focus. Toyota had long built their quality by having tight relationships with suppliers. Toyota would go so far as to provide financial, technical and engineering assistance to their suppliers. If you built say brake pads for Toyota, a technical team would show up with engineers and production folks, help your retool your factory and help you to run it. They did this to ensure that they had the best and most accurately produced parts they could find. The downside to this is that it led them into having rock solid faith in single stream suppliers. Meaning, there was one company that made brake pads, one that made door panels, etc.
Toyota is also unique in the industry in that they do not have chief engineers that oversee entire production lines of various models. Each vehicles is assigned its own chief engineer or "shusa" that retains total control over the vehicles design and engineering and answers only to the executive board. Essentially Toyota was run by engineers whereas everyone else was pretty much run by bean counters.
In 2005 Katsuaki Watanabe became president of Toyota with one mandate, increase profits and continue to grow the companies market share, as they had reached the 6 million vehicle per year mark in 2003 and were closing in on GM to reach the number one spot.
Watanabe leaned hard on the "shusas" to cut costs across the board. His belief was that the prestige of Toyota vehicles would allow the charging of a price premium even if the vehicles went through cost cutting similar to what had plagued the US automakers for years. He then isolated the "shusas" in the process of running the company and built a beurocracy of sales and marketing people that started to actually run the show.
This is why the first issues related to what became the unintended acceleration problem went unaddressed. The "shusas" were never made aware of the issues as they were reported through the sales and marketing chain. They chose not to address them as they felt a recall would damage Toyota's reputation and hurt their sales while chasing the number one slot.
Watanabe was removed in 2009 and was replaced by Akio Toyoda who arrived just in time to inherit all of the fallout from the Watanabe era and is now tasked with "returning the company to its roots". Here's a good article from Fortune on the recent history and challenges of Toyota:
My favorite quote appears under a very puzzled picture of Akio Toyoda...
Akio Toyoda: "It was as if we were engaged in car manufacturing in a virtual world and became insensitive to vehicle failings and defects in the market."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sun Thinker
As all tests showed, and I've done this on my own car, is to shift to neutral. It's extremely easy, since it's the one up from D
Except when it's not. I'll refer back to this thread again as it touched on all of the issues surrounding the case with the troopers Lexus:
The USDOT report found that when one simply pressed "up" on the shift lever, the detents in the transmission naturally moved the car to sport mode / manual shift and not into neutral. In order to reach neutral one needs to apply positive pressure to the right while pushing up to find neutral. While the report concluded that neutral would have worked, it also stated that a person unfamiliar with the operation of the shifter in a panic situation where they are occupied with driving would have difficulty finding it.
The linked thread goes on to discuss several technical changes Toyota made to their vehicles after the incident that were essentially minor software changes, some of which were already used extensively in other cars, that had they been present would have prevented the accident. Among them are commands overriding throttle input when the brake is pressed, including a "panic press" feature on the push-button start and the inclusion of future models to have the gear shifter naturally detent to neutral when pushed up. While the new ES models shifter looks similar, you can see the difference in the spacing and routing of the gear lever.
I remember reading that article, along with many from the entire last decade. Talk about being in the wrong time and place. Ford and GM drew a lot of sympathy, because Toyota was beating up on them all that time. People were delighted they no longer had to take crap from Toyota owners about buying a crap car, they could now pick on Toyota. The Buy American chants ensued, except GM of course.
Basically, Toyota was becoming more like their competitors.
It was bad business decisions Toyota made, purely bad decisions. Hopefully, they have learned their lessons better than their competitors. If not, they will become just like them.
It's only natural to focus blame and anger towards a company that was put on a pedestal, and had the results to prove it. Nobody likes a winner. While GM had always had the number one spot before, nobody would dare put them on a pedestal. Ford always seemed to get by, even in horrible product cycles. Ford has had a multitude of recalls, many of which they fought tooth and nail, some for many years. Honda had many this decade, largely shielded because of media focus on Toyota.
At any rate, they all screw up, and sometimes, they handle it poorly.
I remember reading that article, along with many from the entire last decade. Talk about being in the wrong time and place. Ford and GM drew a lot of sympathy, because Toyota was beating up on them all that time. People were delighted they no longer had to take crap from Toyota owners about buying a crap car, they could now pick on Toyota. The Buy American chants ensued, except GM of course.
Basically, Toyota was becoming more like their competitors.
It was bad business decisions Toyota made, purely bad decisions. Hopefully, they have learned their lessons better than their competitors. If not, they will become just like them.
It's only natural to focus blame and anger towards a company that was put on a pedestal, and had the results to prove it. Nobody likes a winner. While GM had always had the number one spot before, nobody would dare put them on a pedestal. Ford always seemed to get by, even in horrible product cycles. Ford has had a multitude of recalls, many of which they fought tooth and nail, some for many years. Honda had many this decade, largely shielded because of media focus on Toyota.
At any rate, they all screw up, and sometimes, they handle it poorly.
They definitely all screw up, which I guess is the macro point of these threads. Anyone in the industry generally lives by the mantra that "they're all crap, some are just occasionally less crappy then others". To me, it's the handling of those issues. Honda and Toyota have long been resistant to owning up to their issues as has been Ford. GM, for as maligned as it is and in light of the decades of crap they spewed out in the past is actually rather progressive and open when it comes to dealing with issues.
The part I forgot to add to my essay above was about the suppliers which I mentioned but never expanded on...
Watanabe was chasing volume when an issue at a brake pad manufacturer shut down the Camry production line for two weeks. That shut down resulted in a drop in volume that hurt Toyota's market position. Remember, Watanabe was brought in as a "volume, profit, share price" guy.
The solution was to mandate that all parts must have two supplier sources. The issue was that Toyota could not support adding additional suppliers with the same level of tight engineering integration and support they had with their original suppliers. So, for the first time Toyota was essentially bidding out their contracts and just sending blueprints on what to build. This is what led to the case where there were two different designs of the same accelerator pedal used in the same car. One of the pedals had the issue with entrapment, one didn't. Untangling which car had which pedal was almost impossible.
Overall though, these are simply growing pains of a large company. What I found interesting in the article I linked is the assertion by Toyoda that the Toyota Way may simply no longer work at the volume of vehicles Toyota is producing. It's an interesting question for the industry. At what point does a company grow so large and is producing so much volume that they can no longer control the quality process and the product suffers?
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