By any measure (defects per vehicle), failure rate per 1000 miles, initial quality, japanese made cars are good. Makes like LEXUS have very few initial problems, and the vehicle systems (like radio, alternator, water pumps, etc.), show a very low failure rate, over the life of the vehicle. So japanese manufacturers clearly enjoy a premuim over even highly rated european mfgs. like Mercedes-benz. What makes them so good? Is it better materials? Tighter tolerances? or simply better design?
I cannot figure out why GM-DELPHI cannot make alternators that last as long as Nippon-Denso alternators…they are built the same way. Is it because detroit is constantly “nickel and diming” the suppliers? Is this cheapening the final product? The germans clearly are losing ground-I hear from people who have lots of expensive problems with their M-B, Bimmers, and VWs…so what is the japanese 'secret"?
My impression (i.e., I’m talking out my arse) is that the Japanese are more devoted to turning out a superior product than their American counterparts. That is, it seems (to me) that the Japanese take more pride in their work.
American companies seem to be too concentrated on profits. Take the Corvair as an older example. From what I’ve heard, the original design was fairly decent; but GM cost-cutting made it ‘unsafe at any speed’. For want of a few relatively inexpensive parts, they put the Consumer at risk. Then there’s hubris. ‘We know what Americans want!’ In the 1950s and 1960s, when many people were turning to compact cars (source: I’m reading old issues of Road & Track), American carmakers’ idea of a compact car was something like the Falcon or Comet. Still, gas was cheap. After 1973 people wanted fuel-efficient cars; but American auto makers still produced low-mileage land yachts.
Japanese auto makers operated under the ‘Made In Japan’ stigma of the post-war years. They had to ensure quality fit, finish, and operation to counter this stigma. American auto makers seem to have been resting on their laurels, and the push to make more cars for less money harmed quality. It seems to me that American auto makers thought Americans liked useless trim and gadgets, while Japanese cars were more ‘functional’. As a result, American cars often had plastic bits that would fall off, break, or become worn.
The Germans had a reputation for excellent engineering. There was a saying that I heard that went like this: If an American can make something with ten parts, the Japanese could make it with six and the Germans can make it with ninety-two. The original Beetle was in production for 70 years. It wasn’t over-engineered, as the joke may suggest. It was built to be cheap and reliable – and it was. One advantage of low-power engines is that they can be very robust. The VW Beetle, which had only incremental changes (as pointed out in the ads, ‘We don’t make changes for styling’s sake’) bolstered the reputation for German Engineering – despite it’s shortcomings, powerwise, compared to American cars.
The Germans were also noted for their racing cars. The first Porsches, by the way, used VW parts. And early on, their high-end cars were noted for their luxury. With higher-end cars than the VWs (i.e., Mercedes Benz, BMW, Porsche, Audi) you were getting a race-proven design that was reliable and robust and also luxurious. (Well, maybe not ‘luxurious’ in the Porsches; but they featured very nice, functional designs.)
Basically, the higher-end German cars are thouroughbreds. As such, they can be expected to require more maintenance than a more utilitarian vehicle. I think the German propensity for ordnung is a factor as well. That is, if a machine is designed to have x done to it every y miles/kilometres, then the customer is expected to obey.
I think Americans are more lax in sticking to maintenance schedules, so a car that is engineered to certain criteria might need more emergency service than one that doesn’t. The Japanese seem to understand this, and make cars that can operate well even when the owner ignores the scheduled maintenance.
My point about he alternators: an alternator is a simple machine, made of standardized parts. it isn’t assembled by humans anymore (robotic assembly), so there isn’t any "pride in work’ factor involved. but the fact is, most japanese cars go 100,000 miles without an alternator failure. Sadly, DELPHI alternators don’t have such impressive reliability. As for the germans, they are (as you said) enamored of complexity. This is biting them, because germ,an cars seem to be bedeviled with all kinds of electrical gremlins-and a new alternator for an Audi will cost you >$600. I have a friend who owns his own garage, and he always has lots of high-end german cars on his lot, awaiting repair. But people tell me that the lexus line is superb-almost nothing breaks on those cars, at least during the warranty period. i don’t know how they fare a high mileages.
I had a Porsche 924 with an electrical fault. The wipers would turn on for no reason. When the fault couldn’t be traced, I resorted to pulling the fuse.
In my business classes we were told that the Japanese had better cars because they have a style of management that involves constant worker input on how to improve the product. It was called Total Quality Management, I believe. It involves the workers constantly looking for better, faster, more efficent ways of creating the product and management actually implementing their ideas.
(When I worked for a big American company they tried it out. It did not work. Tip–don’t give your employees a monthly quota for ideas, the ideas will be crap. And when you get a good idea, for god’s sake implement it! Don’t sit on it for a few years and then try to make everyone think you thought it up!)
slight HiJack, I am 6’3" and around 200#. why in the hell is it so hard to find a car I can actually drive? and why is it a Japanese car (altima) that fits?
you would think American cars of all the cars you can get would be built for taller than average people.
Consider minivans or the new Ford Five Hundred. Plus a plethora of American SUV’s.
The Altima fits because of the very high roof line. A Maxima is similar.
I’m 6’1" and ride very comforatbly in my Accord or my wife’s tiny Corolla.
My father-in-law just got a brand new Monte Carlo which is huge, however if I drive it my head hits the ceiling.
I always wondered too why a Taurus can’t last as long as a Camry or Accord,
or why a Sunfire can’t last as long as a Civic or Corolla??
The Japanese hold tighter tolerances than US automakers do. This makes a big difference in the longevity of a component. Ford found this out when they had two production lines building the same transmission. One line was in the US, the other was in Japan. Ford was surprised that the Japanese built transmissions were lasting longer than the American built ones, so they took one of the Japanese built transmissions and dismantled it to find out what was going on with it. That’s when they found out that the only difference between the two (they had suspected that the Japanese had done some modifications to it) was the tolerances.
The Japanese also aren’t so rigidly divided when it comes to management and employees like they are in the US, so Japanese management can often be found in the showrooms or on the factory floor. This allows customers and employees to approach them and discuss issues, whereas that doesn’t happen in US car companies. That’s how Toyota ended up with a V-8 in their pick up. They unveiled it to the dealers, one of them asked, “Are you going to put a V-8 in it?”, the Japanese exec said, “We’re thinking about it.” The dealer said, “If you don’t, you might as well go home.”
The Japanese are also driven to built a better product than US carmakers are. Japanese carmakers don’t just have focus groups to tell them what customers like about their cars, but also what customers want in their cars. The Japanese also are more willing to pick up someone else’s idea an run with it. Toyota is the only car maker to own a Tucker (the Henry Ford Museum is seperate from the Ford Motor Company and has been for decades now), and apparently, they’ve picked up at least one idea from it.
Don’t GM executives get a free GM car every three months? That’s gotta give a skewed impression of the quality of their products…
They did when Ross Perot was working there. Add to that most of the execs have limos, so they don’t even drive the cars they’re given.
I’ve heard that was a factor in GM delaying the introduction of electronically controlled transmissions. The cars the execs got were always perfect, with shifts happening very smoothly and at just the right rpm. The production cars OTOH had a lot of variability, with some being way off.
A few factors that may all come together in the “perfect storm” of quality:
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I get the impression that the Japanese care about quality as a culture (this is based on what I have read about home building as well as cars etc.)
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After WWII a man named Deming assisted the Japanese with re-building their manufacturing economy and he was a strong believer in quality. His ideas were ignored here but welcomed in Japan.
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Survival. If you make products poorly, people don’t buy them. (This applies everywhere except with respect to the big 3 automakers in the US, for some reason crappy cars still sell).
I think the combination of these factors (probably among others) has significantly influenced their style of manufacturing.
Recently, most american automakers have really rehandled quality and are back near the top, very close toe the japanese quality overall. The europeans carmakers are actually down quite a bit. GM is the most lacking of all american automakers.
Were they building to the same set of prints? Tolerances are controlled by the prints. On the other hand, there tends to be an American attitude that “as long as I meet the print, nobody can punish me” whereas the Japanese are always trying to improve their processes even if they’re already meeting the print. Thus they could be building to the same prints but getting better results in Japan.
I used to be a design engineer in the American R&D division of a “major Japanese automaker”. We all sat at desks in a big room - we didn’t even have cubicles. The president of the company had a bigger desk, in the corner of the big room, with a three-foot-high temporary wall around him. He ate the same crummy cafeteria food as everyone else. We had to share a common group of PCs and CAD scopes. And we all wore uniforms. And we liked it! (Easy to get dressed in the morning, and they did the laundry for us.)
When I first hired in, they made us all work in the factory for about a month, and they made us do the real shit jobs, like torquing bolts with a big, heavy wrench as cars passed overhead, or diving under the dashboard to put in wire harnesses. Then they put me and another guy in a room with a completely disassembled car, a toolbox, and no manuals. They said, “Come out when it’s put together.” The result was that I knew how the assembly line worked, I knew how the car was put together, and I could walk into the factory at any time and go up to a guy on the line and ask questions without feeling like a dork.
The Japanese home office was even more egalitarian. No three-foot-high walls for anyone. And most people had to share phones. If you wanted to call Miyamoto, you had to ring the phone at his desk block and ask if Miyamoto was around, and if he wasn’t, the sucker who picked up the phone would have to try to find him. And over there, the new engineers not only had to work in the factory, they had to work at dealerships, waxing cars and crap like that. This would go on for six months or so.
Of course, Japanese society is more egalitarian than American society. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a guy in a suit and tie riding a rusty old three-speed bike down a Japanese city street to work. An American in a suit-and-tie job would either drive, or if he did ride a bike, he would dress like Lance Armstrong and ride a $2000 racing bike to be ostentatiously parked in his office, announcing to the world that he cares about the environment and his health.
I’m overgeneralizing here, and I’m not really sure whether the egalitarianism has anything to do with better cars. It’s just something I’ve always found interesting.
You’re right, but it is not necessarily something that is so culturally ingrained that it can’t be taught to outsiders. Most Hondas on the road these days were made in America. There is no discernible difference in quality between an Accord made in Marysville and one made in Sayama.
Plus, as has been mentioned, the Japanese learned most of what they know from American quality control gurus back in the Fifties. They definitely achieve their results through specific techniques that anyone can follow. For the most part, it’s not a matter of culturally specific behavior or instinctive attention to detail.
The other thing I can’t understand…GM and FORD spend tons of money on recalls and fixing problems that could have been easily dealt with BEFORE the cars ever left the factory. Recalls are expensive! It must cost GM easily $200.00 for even a simple product recall-my wife’s car(SATURN ION) was recalled last October (they had a run of cars with a bad LH signal lamp bulb socket-probably a $0.20 item. How do these things happen? This is not to say thatbthe japanese cars don’t have recallls, but they seem to be more frequent with GM made cars.
You have to understand that any more cars aren’t built by the various automotive manufacturers, they’re merely assembled. The subcontractors build modules, which are then shipped to the car maker, who merely bolts them on to the car. So a complete dashboard, with gauges, lights, and radio will be built by the subcontractor, and this then, will be dropped into the car body (which may or may not be built by the car maker [ GM SUV bodies are stamped out by the company that used to make Checker cabs. Remember that the next time some guy in his Escalade cuts you off. He paid big money for a Checker cab!]). All car makers do this. The difference between GM and the other guys, is that the other guys are “in bed” with their suppliers. They have their own inspectors who show up (often unnannounced) and check not only the items on the production line, but also the methods by which they make the parts. If a problem is found on the assembly line, they yank the suppliers people into the factory to show them the problem, and have them correct it on the line. They also charge the hell out of the supplier for this. GM obviously isn’t as tightly integrated with their suppliers as everyone else is.
The Japanese seem more adept at adapting to changing situations and new technologies.
Part of this impression may be that, after the 1973 oil embargo, people wanted more-efficient cars. The Japanese were there. Of course, they’d been building smaller, more-efficient cars for a long time by that date. But Detroit should have seen the trend coming. As I’ve said, I’ve been reading old issues of Road & Track. Even in 1960 magazines were talking about fuel-efficient imports from Japan and Europe, and published mileage figures in their articles. R&T mentioned the trend of small efficient cars in several articles. Detroit responded with ‘compact’ cars that today would be considered medium- or even full-sized. (R&T said that a ‘compact car’ had a wheel base of 100" or less, though they included some larger cars in the class.) Americans seemed to be buying a large number of VW Beetles, Fiat coupés and saloons, and other imports whose mileage was in the upper-20 to lower-30 mpg range. R&T predicted that fuel-efficient compact cars would reach 50% of the new car market.
Even after 1973, Detroit still gave us land yachts – and wondered why the Japanese were kicking out assets. The compacts Detroit gave us seemed crude and cheap next to the Japanese imports (Vega, Pinto, Mustang II).
As I mentioned, Datsun introduced the 240Z on the sports car market. The TR6, its nearest competitor, was getting old. British Leyland seemed unable to build a car that compete with the Japanese import. Instead they belatedly gave us the underpowered TR7. And what were Detroit offering? I don’t really remember, since I was young at the time; but I can think of the ‘pony cars’ like the Camero, Firebird and Mustang. There was also the Corvette. Good cars for going fast in a straight line; but not maneuverable enough for the twisties, and not fuel-efficient.
It seems Detroit had the TTWWADI mentality. (That’s The Way We’ve Always Done It.) In spite of a decade and a half of seeing small cars with big mileage figures coming to our shores, they continued to build big luxury boats and large-displacement, gas-guzzling quasi-sports cars. And it also seems (to me) that labour were getting greedy and lazy. Unions lobbied for higher wages, and there was a time when a guy turning a wrench on an assembly line was making twice what I was making crunching data. And American workers had the stereotype of putting in their eight hours and going home to drink beer, while Japanese workers had the stereotype of being ‘devoted to the cause’.
You are right (JLA): Detroit never seems to think ahead! Why this is, is a mystery-GM certainly employs enough economists, forecasters, and consultants to staff a good-sized university! FORD and GM made huge profits from selling SUVs (until recently). the reason why? SUVs are just a cheap body welded onto a 25-year old truck chassis-they could use the same chassis, engine, transmission, etc., that had long been paid for. Some estimates put FORD’s profit on an “Explorere” at OVER $12,000! Now that gas is pushing towards $3.00, FORD and GM are really in trouble! They have no profitable line of small cars to sell, and they must deeply discount SUVs to sell them. GM will probably have its entire line of small cars built cheap in China and korea, and abandon the small car market to the japanese. The sad thing is, the UAW (although i don’t care for their approach) BEGGED both companies to build small cars! The government didn’t help any …by keeping gas taxes low, they would up ENCOURAGING americans to buy the gaz-guzzling monsters! Will GM go bankrupt? I forsee the entire Michigan congressional contingent doing a full-court press upon Washington (massive bail-out, bonuses for the idiotic top management, and higher taxes for the rest of us).
Over the years, I heard people claim that Japanese companies engage in sneaky, practices, one of which is sending their best, most reliable cars to America, to compete unfairly with US makers. I never put a lot of stock in it, and besides, what’s unfair about selling a better car?
But a while back, I read in the Washington Post that while there wasn’t some nefarious plot as alleged, there was indeed a bias, probably unintentional, in comparisons of Japanese cars to domestic models.
Specifically, Japanese cars sold here in the US have gone through more testing than their counterparts sold in Japan.
The reasons for this have nothing to do with trying to cheat the system – rather, if you’re going to have to fix a car 12,000 miles from the factory, you better make damn sure you’ve got the bugs worked out of that model first.
And, according to the article, American car companies do the same thing when they sell cars overseas.
Assuming this is true (and although it makes sense to me, I am not asserting so, since I can’t find a cite), Japanese cars sold in the US may be the ‘cream of the crop’, and therefore, make US cars look worse than they are.
I also acknowledge that many US manufactureres have closed the quality gap in the last 15 years or so, perhaps making my info obsolete.
Perhaps Hyperelastic could weigh in on this topic?