I wouldn't quite put myself on the far right...yet...I agree (as I previously noted) that the Big 3 hold their individual fates in their own hands after reaping the rewards of mismanagement and poor quality. That being said, I grew up in an area dense with UAW members, the majority of whom had the biggest sense of entitlement and poor work ethic (a bad combination) I have seen so far. I'm also non-union labor in a heavily unionized industry currently, so pardon my bias. "Fair wage" is relative but is an assembly line worker really worth more than many of my college graduate friends in terms of annual salary?
Coming back to the thread at hand...I almost ended up with a Prius (wait was too long, got an HCH II) and based on their overall good performance and the repeatedly poor quality of my previous domestics I'll seriously consider getting one when my wife's lease is up.

 

AshenGrey, you forgot one:

6. They pay lip service to quality. They simply don't understand that to achieve quality you have to be obsessed and fanatical about continuous improvement. The Big 3 are unwilling or unable to implement kaizen, or to even understand the principle.

Harry

 

Sorry, I have to disagree. It has already been proven that American vehicles at this point in time are on a par with the quality of their Japanese Counterparts. The problem is twofold in this regard. The first is that they big three had severe quality problems for many years, and did not address it properly. This left a very bad taste indeed for the American Consumer, which leads to the second part of this, the quality issue is a "perception" because of so many years of real problems. Many American consumers won't even give the big 3 a chance because of prior experience, or the perpetuation of that experience.

As far as the vehicle designs, I think I am with you, the American designs still have some way to go before they get where they need to be. The quality may be there, but they are boring, uninteresting designs that don't really attract people. As was stated earlier, they are putting all their eggs into the SUV's and high end cars.

In regard to wages, The import companies are kicking the big 3 because they can "capitalize" on certain labor markets that the big 3 can't simply because of the union. The big three also have serious pension issues, it is costing them an exorbitant amount of money to maintain the pensions.

Now as far as the OP statement of Toyota overtaking GM as #1, sorry not going to happen anytime soon. GM has a very large presence in Europe and South America that we do not see here, and a market that Toyota is still a small player relatively speaking. So with all of its shortcomings and blemishes, like it or not, GM will be # 1 for a while. Their sales outside the U.S. has increased by almost 16% while the domestic market for them shrank by 5%. The U.S. market is proving to be problematic for them, but I am hopeful that they will turn it around in the next several years.


Now Would I buy a Toyota again, yes, great car, great value. I have one in my driveway now. But as an American, I will always look at an American product first, and if the value isn't there, will then look to the import alternates.

Bill

 

While the quality may be there (I don't think it is in a lot of cars), how the big 3 (I mean big 2 now) stand behind their product is totally different. I have had cars from Ford and Chrysler, of those cars ALL of them had multiple warranty issues in the first 5,000 miles of ownership. Ford thumbed their nose at me and refused to fix their problem, while chrysler fixed it many times. While I am gratefull that Chrysler would fix it, I am not happy that it had to be fixed many times over, and as a result I don't want to buy a chrysler, though I would if I felt the value was there. Now for Ford, i don't care if the value is there, they did not stand behind their product (a premium car that I paid a hefty premium for) so I will NEVER buy another new Ford product for as long as I live (I might buy a classic Ford, but that is only because it would be my building skills that would keep it alive, and not their skill for assembly). Now for GM, my parrents buy a new GM vehicle about every 18 - 24 months give or take. On almost all of the cars they have bought the windows stopped working at around 75,000 miles, and a little bit latter they would start falling down. Now this is not mid 90's cars, no this is current cars that were bought in the last 2-4 years. They have also had other minor issues with the cars.

Now to my TCH, this is the first car I have EVER owned that has required 0 (zero) warranty repairs before 5,000 miles. I now have almost 8,000 miles on the cars and it is still running great with no issues. I have a co-worker with a camry se V-6 that he got earlier this year, and he has around 25,000 miles on it with no warranty work performed. I have a good friend with a mid 90's camry, and they have not had any warranty work dne, only scheduled maintenance, and now their son drives it in college. She had a former boss that has 4runner with over 500,000 miles on it, and he has not had any major work done on it, only routine maintenace (maybe a timing belt) and it does not even burn oil. I could go on, but for you to say that the big 3 - or now the big 2 since chrysler is really Mercedes - is on par with the quality of some foreign cars is just not looking at the facts.

When the american auto compaines wake up, they will see that they have left their customer base in the gutter while tring to sell them on being patriotic instead of a good product. Now that the foreign manufacturers are building their autos here, they can't even hang their hat on that. They are doomed!

 

Toyota and the other imports are not immune from warranty issues. My mother-In-Law bought a Toyota Cressida several years ago and it was plagued by electrical problems from day one. Toyota made several half hearted attempts to fix it, but this car ultimately ended up dying in a fire that destroyed it because of the short the dealer never fixed. My brother had a Toyota Camary that had 4 new water pumps in 2 years. People can come up with just as many stories for the imports as they can with the domestics. ALL car manufactures have issues, it is how those issues are handled that makes a difference. I will agree with you on that one, that the big 3 don't seem to care about good service, and I think that is where Toyota and the other imports really stand out.

I do have to say though, I have not been impressed with my first Honda experience. I have a 2007 Honda Accord Hybrid, and it pops, misses, and has several issues with the Navigation. I have gotten nothing but lip service from the dealership so far. I guess I should mention that in the past 10 years I have had about 4 different American vehicles and never had any problems. Just traded in my GMC for this POS Honda, wish I didn't.

Bill

 

My dad had a 1978 Honda civic (think that is what it was), and he will never own a foreign car again because of the poor reliability of that car. It ate head gaskets, and would run thru gear syncronisers every 5,000 miles. He had to have the heads rebuilt numerous times and the trans fixed many times. I think he got rid of the car with less than 30,000 miles on it, and won't touch a Honda because of it. It got good gas mileage when it ran right though.

 

Kaizen has become a buzzword, just like Six Sigma, TQM and other quality programs developed by business thinkers and business schools. Even ISO 9000 has become a joke. I went to school with a guy, who after graduating went to work for a small manufacturer and was placed on the ISO 9000 compliance team. All he did for the couple of years he was on that team was create and push paper just to create the documentation necessary to show the ISO that they deserved the 9000 certification. Needless to say, he was unimpressed with what ISO 9000 really meant. I believe I heard him say once that the only thing that ISO 9000 proves is that we can produce documentation in the format and style the ISO likes which then grants certification.

I feel the same way. I couple of nights back I had a similar conversation with some family out for Christmas about the health of the American auto industry, and aside from the obvious issues they have with management decisions, a huge drag on their ability to be agile and profitable is the union and union labor. It was also mentioned through the course of this conversation that after valuing all compensation to these union auto workers, they make more in a year assembling vehicles, than most of all the people that buy their product. The math behind that doesn't work out, at least not in the long run.

A car is a machine. We all prefer that for the price we pay that the vehicle is perfect and never costs us any more than is necessary to run. But a machine is built by human hands and even with quality programs and measures in place and the best engineering behind it, stuff can break. Cars can break because they are machines.

Oh, and this is my first Toyota, and I would consider purchasing another. But I level aesthetics and ergonomics in a vehicle greatly. If a vehicle doesn't meet my needs in either of these areas, I move on until I find something that does. Toyota has only created truly respectable interiors in the past 4 or 5 years. Prior to the Prius, I wouldn't have considered Toyota because their interiors were so...well...terrible. They had ugly fabrics, way too much plastic, cheep looking plastic, etc. Aesthetics is a very personal thing, kind of like what colors we like or what we like to wear, and as such does not necessarily reflect negatively against Toyota's quality record, but how a vehicle looks, how it is trimmed out does have an impact on people's decision to buy one vehicle over another.

 

We used to call the US versions of these programs "just in case." It was training for employees 'just in case' it might stick while middle management continued to meet schedule with abysmal product.

Sadly, I have to agree with you since ISO 9000:2000 came out. The earlier standard, ISO 9000:1994, had an outline of what needed to be done and documentation was a small part of it. But when ISO 9000:2000 came out, the outline disappeared and all that remained was a paper exercise. For example, training records were part of ISO 9000:1994 but disappeared in ISO 9000:2000. Without hard requirements, ISO 9000:2000 became an empty shell, the illusion of quality.

Bob Wilson

 

I am not in manufacturing, but I have a friend that is. His company just recently got ISO certified, and all he called it was a way to make dumb people be able to do the same thing over and over and over again. He thought there was no real use to the certification, and all it did was to dumb down the production process from having some skilled people that could do many different tasks well, to having a person that is clueless about the system as a whole, as long as they could make the widget the same every time. Did not matter if they knew what the widget did, nor what the ramifications would be for errors in machining, as long as they could turn out the same product rapidly.

 

Actually it leads to reproducible results that can be improved. The hardest thing in the world to deal with are intermittent problems. When success is tied to unique 'secrets' know by individuals, it become chaos. One symptom is management by 'tiger teams' and it makes vacations and illness something to fear.

I have seen ISO 9000:1994 practices lead to removal of random variabilities and promoting everyone to higher quality problems. We can spend more time focusing on external competition and less on how to keep our own from being our own worst enemies. Like Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Bob Wilson