Whenever I see articles like this, I like to remind people that a great production system doesn't make a company more honest or accountable. Unintended acceleration flaw in Toyota models around 2005 to 2011, due to firmware bugs: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... Great for USA customers. They were made whole. I personally was driving a 2011 Toyota minivan in Thailand in 2013 when I suffe…
I also wonder about research direction, such as the hydrogen fuel cell mirai, which doesn't seem practical.
(of course it could be that when they started down that path, it was not clear that battery electric vehicles were practical either)
Are those companies known for their speed and quality of code delivery? Have they published studies and popularised their approaches? Have they, or anyone else, generalized their approaches to things other than specific software categories? The thing about the manufacturing processes that have come out of Toyota (and others), or the ideas from Deming, Goldratt, and others, is that they're more about general systems t…
Nintendo releases more software than Toyota
Maybe don’t edit your post next time? Especially after people have replied. That’s a very dishonest mode of discussion.
Are those companies known for their speed and quality of code delivery? Have they published studies and popularised their approaches? Have they, or anyone else, generalized their approaches to things other than specific software categories? The thing about the manufacturing processes that have come out of Toyota (and others), or the ideas from Deming, Goldratt, and others, is that they're more about general systems t…
Ironically Toyota now has longer product lives than many other mainstream manufacturers. The Camry and Corolla are on roughly 6 year product lifecycles. The 4Runner has barely changed in 10 years.
> The 4Runner has barely changed in 10 years. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider how and where it's used. It's easier to have service and repair infrastructure for one car with identical mechanicals over a decade than 3 or 4.
Honda makes cars. Toyota makes appliances for people who hate driving.
Do you have some links for the history? I'm interested in Lean and Kaizen. Made a comment about it in this thread.
It's covered a little in the TAL episode on NUMMI[1]. There's also a bit of it involved with TWI[2][3]. I'd read some other interesting things about skill transfer post-WW2 with the Marshall Plan but having trouble finding the original source material. [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry#Post_... [3] https://twi-institute.org/training-within-i…
This part from your link [2] is interesting:
>In the Foreword to Dinero's book "Training Within Industry", John Shook relates a story in which a Toyota trainer brought out an old copy of a TWI service manual to prove to him that American workers at NUMMI could be taught using the "Japanese" methods used at Toyota. Thus, TWI was the forerunner of what is today regarded as a Japanese creation.
You call it a "myth" then use one example, that disproves the point (why urge to act against a "myth") and another that's a single data point, while ignoring the rest of the market. That's a pretty poorly explored position.
I would have though that the CEO of the world's largest investment company would count more than "one single data point". I know there are a few examples of short term investors ruining a company - but have you any examples of companies punished for choosing long term over short term?
> I would have though that the CEO of the world's largest investment company would count more than "one single data point".
I said that CEO undercuts your point. You claimed short-term-ism was a "myth," then quoted a CEO saying that a lot of people focus on short term investing, rather than long term investing. Therefore making it not a myth, according to your own source.
> The 4Runner has barely changed in 10 years. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider how and where it's used. It's easier to have service and repair infrastructure for one car with identical mechanicals over a decade than 3 or 4.
Honda makes cars. Toyota makes appliances for people who hate driving.
With a couple of exceptions in the enthusiast sector, where they are well regarded. Or at least they did at one point. I am of course thinking of the cars with the 1JZ and 2JZ engines. I have an inkling that my heuristic might also correlate with Yamaha input, but on that I'm not certain (not knowing the whole engine lineup)
In the 1960s, my father was a manufacturing engineer for BigTechFirm (this was back when BigTechFirms built actual stuff, rather than trafficking in webshit). On the shop floor, there were A, B, and C workers on a line in descending order of skill level required and roughly ascending order of available workers. It was a true assembly line model. I believe the A and B workers had more variety to their work but the C w…
It wasn't just your father. A lot of American companies never felt the need to improve. It's kind of sad really.
In an industrial systems engineering class we learned of Deming who was trying to help American auto manufacturers with quality control and they wouldn't hear of it. He later was in Japan and influenced the ideas over there. Japan would go on to create the Deming Prize as one of their highest awards one could be given for quality
They should call this "The Deming Way" since most of it sounds identical to Deming's management philosophy and he taught Toyota back in the 1960s[1]. His system also had 14 points, which probably isn't a coincidence[2]. [1] https://blog.deming.org/2016/10/toyotas-management-history/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
Don't forget Japan even has an award named after Deming for quality!
From what I understand, the computer will (and should) reject the acceleration attempt in favor of the brake. But, if you own a reasonably modern vehicle, try it :)
That's not how it works. The brakes are more powerful than the engine, sure, but only at full braking power. Ask anyone who owns a rear-wheel-drive sports car what happens when you push both pedals at the same time and they will literally leave you in a cloud of smoke.
The RWD thing is definitely important here. Given that the majority of cars and a significant number of SUVs are now FWD, this doesn't hold water. Given it is the front brakes that are more powerful than the rears, and if your brakes are maybe a tad worn out, you might not be able to take your brakes from a dynamic friction situation to a static friction situation. In the mean time, your engine would just continue injecting heat into the brakes, which could easily overcome them. It might also be that he was not braking with the full force initially, meaning some degree of heat saturation may have already been present.