Why Toyota Makes the Most Reliable Cars, Japanese vs American Culture

Rev your engines, today I am going to talk about why Toyota

makes

such

reliable

cars

, what is the reasoning behind it, and I will start by telling you the truth, no one sponsors this, Toyota does not sponsor this, I have been a mechanic for 51 years. Look at my driveway, I have a 1994 Celica, a 2007 Toyota Matrix, and a 2002 Lexus, and I bought all of these vehicles used. Now, why did I buy Toyota products? Lexus is a Toyota product. Let's not mix names there, well precisely because I am a mechanic, from Monday to Friday I spend all my time fixing other people's

cars

, do you really think that on Saturday and Sunday I want to have to fix my own cars, I want the

most

reliable

cars? so I don't have to work on things, even though I buy them used I al

most

never have to do anything to them anyway, now why is the Toyota line reliable?

Well, you have to understand that it is a different

culture

, I have a I have a master's degree from the University of Illinois and some of the things I studied were Asian business, being a Japanese company, Toyota was always thinking about the future, sometimes even decades of anticipation, where American manufacturers, hey, like most American corporations, especially the publicly traded ones, are worried about the stock price, so they think about the quarterly reports. Sometimes they only think about three months and not three decades. There is a real difference between short and long term profits. Take also Toyota in the 70's and 80's, people accused them of getting rid of their small pickup trucks in the United States, they certainly didn't cost much back then, they do it today, but they didn't do it before, they themselves built a market of People who like their trucks small, they wanted a reliable small truck, so they sold a bunch of them, yeah, they certainly didn't make that much money at first selling those trucks, but they sure do now, they built a market just by improving their vehicles little by little.

I remember when I was a young mechanic in the '60s, everyone laughed at the Japanese stuff and said, oh, those little rice burners, those little puddle jumpers, what good are they? Well sometimes being conservative pays off in the business world, Toyota never made a V8 truck until the tundra, they were originally going to call it the t-150, but Ford threatened to sue them, so they dropped that and decided to call it. the tundra, they were worried they wouldn't be able to sell them in large enough volume, they started making them in Indiana, where they used to make their forklifts, so they were very conservative, ended up selling every one they made, and started making more and more custom that people saw, Wow, a big, reliable Japanese truck with a V8 engine, that's not their primary market.

You know, they're not going to beat Ford and sell V8 trucks like the. F-150, that's a real American thing and they've been building those F-150s for decades to perfect them as time goes on, but the tundra shows one basic thing about Toyota, they were conservative at the beginning, okay we'll do it. Try V8 trucks now and a small amount, then as they became popular they started making more and selling more, although big trucks weren't really in their market, they were more into cars for people to use, That's where they earned the most. of their profits, look at the Camrys and Corollas, they sold millions and millions of those things, and really when you look at them they weren't particularly attractive, and they didn't ride very well at first, but it just didn't break, and a lot of that has to do with their entire manufacturing structure in Japan, where they don't have the big fight between workers and management like in the United States, where they are doing it tooth and nail, in In Japan, a good job in a factory was seen as an all-inclusive thing. life, people went on summer vacation together and everyone was treated well, and this didn't exist, oh, we are the workers and the management is screwing us, it's a completely different scenario than the United States, and let's be real if you have a happy workforce and you keep making your vehicles better and better and perfecting them and then you try new things from time to time, but doing it conservatively. , your vehicles will probably leave the line better armed than in a different scenario, where management and workers are together all the time, hey, I've even had private conversations with businessmen in the United States. working for big corporations, and they said, Scotty, we can't compete with the Japanese at the same level, because they just have a different society, they said the pressure for short-term profits was very high in the United States, and there's always an attempt to maximizing that, either by reducing the quality of car parts to save money or by paying less money to those who built them, and if you think about it, both are not a good idea, right.

I don't want lower quality parts and I don't want the people who build to be paid less and less as time goes on, so if your main focus is not, how can we make more profits by reducing the quality of our products or by paying the least workers, you are going to make better quality vehicles, that's just common sense, now I admit it, I'm a cheapskate, I bought all these Toyotas and Lexuses, I bought them used, but since Toyotas are so well made, you can buy one, it has some mileage and I still drive it for years.

I mean, sometimes my own customers have argued with me saying, oh, I'm happy with my Chrysler, I haven't had any problems with it and then I say, well, how many miles do you have on it and they tell me we have 30,000 miles, and I just I laugh and say, call me when you get a hundred thousand or if it gets to 150,000 and you spend a lot of money fixing it, and in the last three decades, I really haven't found anything that is more reliable for the money than Toyota products, and I only I hope they don't start following the Americans, but unfortunately I see a bit of that in the newer Toyotas, I see things that break long before they are used too, I have seen broken power door locks on cars that were only two and three years old, I see that the water pumps are breaking down. on vehicles that had maybe 40,000 miles on them, but let's hope it's just a fluke and they don't follow the line of planned obsolescence and start making cars that break down before their time, so if you don't want to miss another one of my car repair videos new ones, remember to ring the bell!