Taking Responsibility?

Toyota enjoyed a long stretch of producing cars that were reliable and with low maintenance records that lasted for several hundred thousand miles before needing a new car.

This long stretch of success is cause for slacking off and becoming over confident in their product that people start becoming less attentive. There's not enough happening to keep them on their toes. They have a great quality program and somewhere people stopped following the Standard Operating Procedure.

The company is an employee driven company and everyone in the company will be involved in finding out what went wrong and will fix it.

That is one of the major advantages that brought Toyota to the top of the food chain in the automotive industry is that the employees are empowered with being in the decision making processes. The ideas and opinions of the regular employees is valued by management.

You can rest assured Toyota will find the problems and fix them and start putting reliable automobiles back on the road.

Toyota hit a stumbling block but they are still a company for all other automotive manufactures to benchmark their practices after.

What is surprising, is that as much "testing" as car manufacturers do that the defect wasn't known about before being released to the public. Somebody, somewhere in the company probably was raising warning flags. In that regard, Toyota has completed it's emulation of the American business model. I was looking for an article to cite for this discussion to reinforce this point. Instead I came across this one, which actually rebuts my comment about "testing": (I've pasted a couple of the pertinent comments that follow the article.)

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/toyota-stumbles-towards-another-north-america-loss/

		srogers January 13th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Len, Are you a Toyota insider? Otherwise how do you know that their 'computer simulation' is a f-upped excuse for real world testing, or that they don't do extensive real world testing? If you are an industry insider, I apologize for even questioning you – but really you can't blame me because any bare-assed pre-pubescent with a keyboard can quote Internet rumours as fact. (Not that I think that you are a bare-assed pre-pubescent; but you know what I mean.)

		Len_A January 13th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
srogers – Automotive News had a real nice, long article about five years ago, on how much theoretical research Toyota did, and built up this huge data base on different automotive systems and components. I'm not knocking them for that – they themselves, in interviews for Automotive News and Ward's Auto World, talked about how they were trying to shorten the concept-to-production time frame. They aren't the only ones doing this – all the automakers have done this. But Katsuaki Watanabe was the one who let the cat out of the bag, in 2006, when he not only told Automotive News that he was ordering a slow down in the product development cycle, but ordered an increase in prototyping. I just remember my jaw hitting the ground when I read that – and for all the claims now about "media traps", the mainstream news media, as well as financial media like Wall Street Journal, ignored Toyota's quality problems, like the engine sludge issue and the Camry and Avalon transmission problems, even though Automotive News covered these issues all the way back to 2002. And I was in the industry, as a vendor, for over twenty-five years, and my wife spent ten years as a paralegal involved on the manufacturer defense side of safety and warranty liability litigation. She used to have great access to all the NHSTA investigations of ALL the automakers – you end up with no illusions about Toyota's quality after five minutes of that reading. No offense taken.

In my manufacturing experience, such major calamities such as these are due to upper management driving savings over safety/quality.

Often Sixth Sigma is part of that decision I have found......were they ever involved with Toyota?

On car production, it usually takes 3-5 years for the effects, good or bad, to be obvious....

Remember the Mexican/Spaniard (José Ignacio López de Arriortúa) that almost drove Opel into the ground maybe almost 20 years ago?

As an after-thought to posting the comments about Toyota, I was thinking... Many of our (humanity's) problems are self-inflicted. I think a lot of it is because of blind bulling forward in the name of technology and "progress". Is the goal of work to produce ever more advanced technology? Shouldn't we decide when technology is "good enough"? Or better yet, maybe we need to realize when technology becomes harmful. I know there are still many who doubt man is causing global warming, or that there is even such a thing. For all those who want to bury their heads in the sand, just go visit the many streams, rivers, and lakes that were once pristine (by today's status) if you doubt man's effect on his environment. Too much technology and "progress", too fast, has done one thing, though... it has created "work" and careers for many of us. But at what price? Most of our degenerative diseases are due to eating "manufactured", highly processed food. Then we create a pharmaceutical industry and advanced instrumentation for examining the body to try to "cure" these diseases.

The earth should have been viewed as a giant terrarium, or at least respected, as the Indians did. The European mind came to this continent and we see the result. That is also where the Crusades and Inquisition occurred. I find the trend toward the future as disturbing as I do hopeful.

The biggest driver is actually that corporations must continue to create profit every quarter. and as corporations continue to grow, then creative individuals looking for their own niche must be ever more creative and inventive in order to compete. Competition is the basis of the system.

good thinking though.

Chris

Could it be possible that there could be a political aspect involved?

The time-lines seem to suggest this.

My wife had a 2000 or 2001 Camry Solara 6 cylinder 24 valve with the oil gel / sludge issue. Real nice car (about $40k new) but Toyota attempted to blame her for the oil issue the second time the engine had to be rebuilt. It had all the classic symptoms of the sludge / gel both times. We received one letter from Toyota stating they would warranty the engine against such failures for as long as she owned the car with the requirement that regular maintenance was performed. That was not true. First they denied any of the oil changes which were done at Jiffy Lube or where ever because Toyota did not do them, then they said they would not honor the warranty letter from the factory, and the engine rebuild would have to be paid for by her. Toyota has a history of avoiding, ignoring, and denying problems until sales are impacted. We will never own another Toyota product, I saw the "Toyota" namesake and chairman (I think) testimony before the committee and just got mad because it was all lies. Toyota finally rebuilt the Solara engine but we got rid of the car and that is where the Toyota poor quality legacy is really felt, the resale value. Resale values cannot be artificially created and for being such an expensive car new, the trade in value in 2006 was less than one-tenth of the new price and this car was immaculate. Whoever bought the car will enjoy about two or three years then it will start to burn oil again. The root cause was not resolved just the same parts replaced. We got her a 350Z and the car is problem free.

You saw your problem as being 'a Toyota problem'

It wasn't. It was a 'dealer' problem. Getting rid of the car was, to me, 'cutting off your nose to spite your face'.

Problem denial is driven from the dealer end usually. He is unable to communicate the import of the situation to the 'maker'.

Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.

You obviously enjoyed the vehicle, apart from the engine problems. Why cop a huge loss, when the engine is fixed, by getting rid of the thing.

All of my Toyotas, indeed all of my Japanese made machinery ( Nissan included), have been significantly more trouble free than from any other.

180 thus far.

Cheers,

Stu.

I have this to say.

Chris

Many years ago, AUDI had a similar problem that was "uncreatable". I believe that their extensive investigations and testing found the cause of the operator claims. I predict that what Toyota is being subjected to (here in the US) will ultimately be traceable to the same....

Source: Wikipedia

Reported sudden unintended acceleration

Audi's U.S. sales fell after a series of recalls from 1982-1987 of Audi 5000 models^[15] associated with reported incidents of sudden unintended acceleration linked to six deaths and 700 accidents.^[15] At the time, NHTSA was investigating 50 car models from 20 manufacturers for sudden surges of power.^[16]

A 60 Minutes report aired 23 November 1986,^[17] featuring interviews with six people who had sued Audi after reporting unintended acceleration, showing an Audi 5000 ostensibly suffering a problem when the brake pedal was pushed.^[18][19] Subsequent investigation revealed that 60 Minutes had engineered the failure — fitting a canister of compressed air on the passenger-side floor, linked via a hose to a hole drilled into the transmission.^[17]

Audi contended, prior to findings by outside investigators,^[16] that the problems were caused by driver error, specifically pedal misapplication.^[16] Subsequently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concluded that the majority of unintended acceleration cases, including all the ones that prompted the 60 Minutes report, were caused by driver error such as confusion of pedals.^[20] CBS did not acknowledge the test results of involved government agencies, but did acknowledge the similar results of another study.^[21]

With the series of recall campaigns, Audi made several modifications; the first adjusted the distance between the brake and accelerator pedal on automatic-transmission models.^[15] Later repairs, of 250,000 cars dating back to 1978, added a device requiring the driver to press the brake pedal before shifting out of park.^[15] A legacy of the Audi 5000 and other reported cased of sudden unintended acceleration are intricate gear stick patterns and brake interlock mechanisms to prevent inadvertent shifting into forward or reverse.