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Comment by nreece | Hacker News Reader

I want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. It seems like the Toyota defects are not defects but isolated incidents, which the US congress has exploited to get back to a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry.

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Steve Woz was pretty vocal about the Prius thing, I remember seeing a post of his on Slashdot about how the acceleration thing was definitely a repeatable bug somehow related to cruise control.

Fake edit: Found it, he details it first in a post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299... And then it gets its own discussion here http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Sc...

I have no reason to doubt Woz, but what's the point of yet another claim with no evidence to back it up?

Woz claims it's repeatable. So why not buy a cheap camcorder, get a friend to be the passenger/cameraman, go record an instance of it actually happening and put it on YouTube? It would be on every news channel in the country the next day and Toyota would be forced to respond directly.

In fact, if I had the kind of money Woz did and thought there was a real danger here, I'd just buy a camera that installed in the headliner and recorded everything that was happening while the car was on at all times, so that I could easily catch the bug when it occurred.

An alternative theory is that Toyota, in its hubris-driven quest to surpass GM for automotive production, broke a lot of its own rules regarding quality control and long-term relationships when it comes to part sourcing. A lot of this seems to be driven by the fact that the car maker that has a problem is Toyota; not because they are a Japanese car company, but because they are a car company who have spent decades building a (justified) reputation for high-quality automobiles with a very low defect rate and over the past few months all of that work disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Or, perhaps it is less that they dropped everything in their race to get ahead, and more that they lost themselves when they became so huge. Perhaps, in the lingo of hackernews, their business model is having trouble scaling past a certain point.

I've worked in the auto parts industry - while it's true that Toyota is ruthless in that market, so is everyone else. In fact, during my short time there we all hated GM with a raging passion - they constantly demanded more and more from suppliers while slashing prices thinner and thinner. Threats of outsourcing manufacturing to China and Korea were common, and because of these tactics suppliers were going belly up day by day.

None of the major car companies are saints - all are guilty of failing to maintain an effective ecosystem. Their behaviour is as deplorable as Wal-Mart but far less infamous.

As far as I can tell there's much to be said for your thesis, except that the breakdown seems to be in design (engineering), not badly manufactured parts.

Prior to this mess I'd read that most of Toyota's major recalls were due to design defects; the cost cutting push resulted in these bad parts being put into more and more different car models resulting in bigger and bigger recalls, but the root cause was early in the process.

A little quality time with Google will find a lot of support for this, e.g. in how they drastically compressed the time to develop new models and more recently pledged to add 6? months or so to the process, although people are skeptical it actually happened.

When you burn out your engineers you're not likely be happy with the long term result.

There should be a lot of other evidence of Toyota's quality falling off if that is the case. If 2005-2010 Toyotas end up rusting out faster and burning up transmissions faster then that might be the reason, from what I understand they have so far been amongst the most reliable cars ever made. There have been some suggestions that they are using lesser grade plastics and metals in some of the bodywork but I'm not sure that actual quality issues have been raised yet.

We're talking about freak accidents though. Even if these issues could be attributed to a real electronic or mechanical problem they still happen with a frequency which is probably remarkably close to the frequency of similar human errors. The successful Japanese company that has knocked off GM sure is an easy scapegoat. I wonder if there is a racial component to the complaints as well.

It's ironic, Toyota has a very long history of improving. GM is coming out of bankruptcy, as is Chrysler, according to JD Powers, Ford is the best quality American car maker and their quality is "average." I'd double down on Toyota going back to the drawing board and raising the bar even higher. If the media or congress was trying to get some American pay back they might have a window but I expect it to get substantially more difficult to compete with Toyota. Not that we should ever fear to call a corporation to task for their faults but this is one that has held overall quality in such high regard for so long and it's such a key part of their culture.

Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry

Toyota is, off the top of my head, the fourth biggest employer in the US auto industry.

Off the top of your head? What would it be if you looked it up?

87,700 Ford 68,500 GM 58,000 Chrysler 36,000 US employees for Toyota

If you take into account that Toyota is the largest non-domestic producer of cars in the US then it makes good sense.

A better motivation: Toyota is "a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the UAW."

Employing non-union workers doesn't count, you know.

I sympathize with the general point, but Toyota is also the fourth largest employer of unionized auto workers. They've been careful about threading the needle between competitive effectiveness and appeasing the unions to avoid getting legislated out of existence by "friends in high places". They have an advantage over the legacy auto manufacturers, though, in that they weren't here in the 70s to make the stupendously bad decisions that the unions have handcuffed the Big Three to.

(Though I guess the whole "the clever hawk hides his claws" thing is not working that well this year.)

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