Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.
Yeah I wouldn’t bet against Toyota in a game of catch up. They’ve proven over and over that their real strength is in doing what other companies have proven out and doing it better and more efficiently.
Toyota production system heavily favors autonomation vs automation. That combined with incremental process improvements and heavy bureaucracy has been a huge impediment
>An alternative view...is creating a bleeding-edge factory...
This is not what Toyota does. VW does this[1]. Tesla does this[2]. But not Toyota [3].
Watch those videos. Which ones are full of robots and computers? Which ones are all manual labor? My tone should give it away.
The Toyota Production System link you cite was heavily developed by Taiichi Ohno. You can learn more in his 1978 book: "Toyota Production System". There's a whole chapter on procurement. Taiichi san's very, very strong belief is:
When purchasing new equipment, we must consider buying the
minimum capable of meeting our requirements. Reliability and
ease of maintenance should be considered before features.
Bells and whistles can often be added later if the need
arises. We want to avoid buying features "just in case." We
must consider up-time, utilization and quality factors when
making equipment choices.
Further emphasis is put on making old equipment last longer. Less 'bleeding edge'. More 'minimum viable' meets 'minimum risk'.
Design emphasis is very conservative. Material choice is very conservative. You will not find innovation. You will find reliability. You will find simplification. You will find repeatability. As far as risk goes, Toyota is the bond market of the automotive industry.
They make a vehicle in nearly every category. It is a standout in none of them. The engines are bulkier. They are less fuel efficient. They underperform in nearly every metric. They are costly for their performance specs. But they last.
The interesting thing about their production line system is how much is focused on the people on the line rather than automating the process on the line. It's the YC version of "Talk to your users" - except applied to workers on the line. Most companies try to automate this step out. Toyota does remove their workers - but only to get more training. This English translation[4] of a Le Monde artice from a few years ago goes into extensive detail about the "Takumi" system of training master craftsmen.
Toyota gets a lot of deserved credit for making great products - how they make those products is frequently misunderstood - famously so by Detroit in the '80's. Their process is counter-intuitive and worth a study. I recommend starting with Taiichi's book mentioned above.
It's also shocking to anybody who had studied Toyota's history. Toyota spent decades honing their processes, but are notoriously automation-averse [1], as automation locks in a (hoped-for) short-term productivity gain but prevents the human-driven continuous improvement that has made them highly productive. [2]
In some ways, I think the long software-is-eating-the-world boom has been bad for us as an industry. We have been so successful with "throw tech at it" solutions that we don't know when that isn't a good idea. E.g., the Silicon-Valley-reinvents-grilled-cheese flop The Melt [3], or the $120m clown show that was Juicero [4].
American car companies spent decades trying and failing to learn Toyota's approach. They even had enthusiastic help from Toyota, who even went so far as to take GM's worst plant and redo it as a joint venture. (Interestingly, it's the same plant that Tesla now uses. [5]) For those unfamiliar with the story, I strongly recommend This American Life's episode on it. [6] But my takeaway was that executive arrogance kept GM from learning that there was a much better way to make cars. That sounds more and more familiar these days.
> Couldn't you argue that the majority of cars are built mostly with robots? There may not be a brake changing robot, but I bet there's a brake installing one. When it gets to the point that the automated labor is cheaper than or more efficient to the human labor, you'd see the switch.
For a different perspective you should look at Toyota's business model. And Moravec's Paradox.
The companies (mostly American) which follow the paradigm you're describing tend to have flashy but less valuable products because they break down more frequently. If you examine the car market you'll notice Toyota vehicles have a huge premium. This is because customers know they are reliable.
It is easy to say "oh, we won't be naive about automation, we'll do it properly", but in practice not many companies manage to do this because the savings from automation are an obvious win, the hiccups come later.
> Would you have sources about Toyota factories being less automated than their US competitors?
It's kind of a cliche at this point - but a good start is 'The Toyota Way', which talks about developing people. I'd also be interested if you can find an authoritative source. I just have a lot of news articles - a good overview is this one in industryweek (https://www.industryweek.com/operations/tesla-vs-tps-seeking...).
The basic principle is somewhat obvious - automation is efficient, but inflexible. That often leads to machines sitting idle, or the overproduction of unsaleable stock. So it's a kind of poison chalice - it looks like you'll reap huge profits, but if your car doesn't sell well, you're screwed. If you invest in people instead, you can react to changing economic conditions.
I've noticed when a Toyota does pretty much anything, and it's in the customer's hands; it just does the job.
They learned long ago a satisfied customer is the best advertising. Yes, they still need to advertise, like all companies. The average consumer still cares about cup holders, over a reliable engine, or powertrain.
I have a weird feeling they are farther along with fully autonomous driving than they claim.
They made their reputation on reliability. They didn't come out in the 80's and say our vechicles will drive you 200,000 miles with not too many garage visits.
Let the other companies produce the first round, and take all the heat for mishaps. Then, if they haven't outlawed them, just sell the customer the vehicle that drives itself flawlessly.
They don't need money to promote their stock. They don't need to finance their research. Why claim they are close to AI driving until the product is perfect?
They could wait a few years, and decimate all competition with a superior product.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks Toyota has failed. If two of the US automakers hadn't been bailed out by the US Government, Toyota (with all of its current challenges) would have bought up thousands of dealerships and dozens of plants in the US and would be poised to totally dominate the worldwide automotive market.
Instead, it had a bit of bad luck (requiring a recall) and it now faces stiff competition from two companies kept in business by massive government subsidies.
I think most people would still rather buy a Toyota than a Chrysler, Ford, or GM vehicle, on the basis of both safety and reliability -- and increasingly performance and styling.
The fact is, Toyota already won in the marketplace. It deserves to have a near monopoly because it fought harder and smarter for decades, slowly earning customer confidence and loyalty. What were the fruits of its labor? Now it gets to fight against massively subsidized ghosts from its past who have already lost the battle but are reanimated by politicians waving American flags, etc.
And now the American press seems to be having a field day claiming that Toyota has failed after one major recall. Note that similar stories about Toyota's demise surfaced after the firm had its first unprofitable quarter ever at the same time that two US automakers became insolvent.
This anti-Toyota propaganda really boggles the mind.
Toyota was never a top car manufacturer in terms of safety and efficiency, and especially in the 90s. The Prius came out in the 2000's. The Hilux and Land Cruiser got terrible fuel economy. Their vehicles weren't terribly unsafe, but they didn't invent seat belts, or air bags, or abs, or stability control. They were a top manufacturer in terms of reliability and ease of repair.
Ehm, they are the world standard in manufacturing, and that standard rather famously includes letting humans do a lot of the general assembly. No one is raining on Toyota, they are excellent at almost everything.
What's your issue with this paragraph about Toyota, exactly? I get that kaizen, with its emphasis on boring notions like quality control, slow & careful iteration, etc. is at odds with fashionable Silicon Valley ideas of blitzscaling or an under-five-years "cash out, bro down" company cycle, but it's undeniably true that Toyota did revolutionize the auto industry.
The article is more interesting than the headline, which seems like a shallow attack on the Toyota practices. But those practices led to them being the best car manufacturer in history for reliability, and the headline rubbed me the wrong way.
Yeah, when you want to reduce one type of risk, you sometimes open yourself up to other types of risks. Single supplier and jit processes reduces some forms or risk and increases others. It’s a trade off
Toyota is a global car manufacturing company who has been manufacturing cars (and building new car factories) for many many decades now. This is will be Tesla's first high volume line of vehicles. I think it makes sense for some time to work out kinks in process and meta-processes.
Even a couple of years back when Toyota passed GM as highest volume maker of vehicles, the execs at Toyota said there was a moment where they took their eye off clean processes and Toyota quality suffered a bit. Some of that I suspect had to do with the timing of the retirement of a generation of very experienced people in Toyota. I think they've since been on a corrective course.
And this is the auto industry. Their bad decisions based on their vaunted experience has led them to the situation they face now.
Experience didn't save them. Hell on the other side, experience didn't make Toyota the company it is now (although they did recently post a loss, they are hardly in GM's position). Willingness to disregard that experience and try something that made sense did.
Years of experience is a poor indicator of success.
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