Comments on: Toyota Wracked by Quality Concerns

By: Sticky Situation for Toyota

Sticky Situation for Toyota — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:05:38 +0000

[...] production, and recall millions of vehicles? No process is perfect, of course, but I wonder how Toyota — the former king of quality, failed to put the brakes on this pedal problem a long time [...]

By: Blake Mason

Blake Mason — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:57:18 +0000

The reality of “lean” has finally hit home: because of an unplanned quality issue, Toyota cannot issue the “new” gas pedals until April, according to the article. Well hooray for no inventory of anything! And hooray for the glory of the lean manufacturing wait times which makes every part order delayed by months. Lean is too often touted in buzz-word filled managerial meetings as the great panacea for all manufacturing issues. In many cases it has been applied against all common sense and stupidity results. Any manufacturing mentality that makes it impossible for me to order a mass-produced gas pedal and get delivery in a reasonable time is unreasonable.

By: John Cooper

John Cooper — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:08:17 +0000

I recently received my bachelors and masters in a manufacturing program that is quality- oriented and the professors frequently mentioned Toyota as an exemplar of quality. However, my experience with a Toyota product was extremely dissapointing. I purchased a 1991 Camry that was 13 years old with about 100,000 miles on it. Everything I had heard and read about the Camrys indicated I should be able to get 200,000-300,000 miles if it was in good shape when I got it and I continued to take good care of it. It appeared to be well cared for when I purchased it and I did take very good care of it. However, in my 35 years of owning and driving cars, I have never experienced such poor vehicle quality. I found myself replacing not only an unbelievable amount of parts on the car, but some of the repairs were repeats of previous repairs I had made that should have normally lasted many years between failure. I figured it up once, and the average cost of the parts over the time I owned the vehicle was more that what I would have paid for a monthly car payment if I hadn’t paid cash for the car. As a former GM technician, I am aware of how to properly care for a vehicle, and as an avid car lover of all brandsI try to purchase different makes and models of vehicles to see how I like them so as not to be biased toward a particular brand and miss out on something else really great out there in the marketplace. I am a great believer in Lean as a management system, and am writing my dissertation on that very topic, but can see that even a great management system does not necessarily equate to high quality 100% of the time, no matter how famous a company’s reputation is for quality. As far as I am concerned, one Toyota was one too many for me.

By: xchngcoef

xchngcoef — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:08:52 +0000

I can attest to the loss of quality at Toyota dating to 2003. I have a Sienna with several unacceptable quality problems, some identical ones occured in an earlier Previa.