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Comment by mcot2 | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of amazing concepts that Toyota developed. It requires a lot of discipline, focus and commitment to implement properly.

One thing I didn’t see mentioned that Tesla is currently doing is a very strong relationship between design and production. The upcoming Cybertruck for example doesn’t have paint and it has an exoskeleton design that should be much easier to produce. Over the years I have not seen any radical designs from Toyota that suggest that the ease of production was influencing radical design choices.

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Designing for production became highly unfashionable because the big three did it extensively in the 1970s and 1980s resulting in very efficient production of cars nobody wanted.

It's one thing to try something new. It's another to re-try something that failed (or was correlated with failure) within the lifetimes of people still in the industry.

Toyota doesn't buck trends like that. They're very conservative.

Tesla on the other hand takes risks.

Were the cars not substantially less expensive to produce? Even the notoriously ugly Aztek was able to sell "okay" at a discount to similarly equipped cars.

I guess nobody wants to be the discount brand in the long term...

https://junkyardmob.com/blog/what-happened-to-chrysler-k-car

Great as long as you expect only 50K miles out of them.

Toyota has a completely different strategy,

My mom had a K wagon and loved it; she sold it after our first July in Virginia though (it had no A/C and sitting in traffic with no AC when the dew-point is in the upper 70s is no fun). It definitely had more than 50k miles on it when she sold it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hilux good because Top Gear, we get it,

Car reliability is just applied sociology. Vehicles last however long people keep fixing them and people keep fixing them as long as they expect them to last.

The 80s Japanese cars that the internet loves to circle jerk about where not any better than their domestic counterparts when put in equivalent hands. It wasn't until the 90s when the domestics somewhat ignored their car lines in favor of the new SUV hotness that the Japanese cars pulled ahead in terms of quality. You have to remember that the Japanese had various levels of partnerships with various American manufacturers at this time. It's not like either group was doing things the other was unaware of.

The K-cars and the other domestic stuff was CHEAP. That means that a lot more of them found themselves in the hands of bottom of the barrel customers. The kind of people who today roll 10k of negative equity into a Nissan Altima financed for 84mo with $0 down. Those are not the kind of vehicles that get garaged, get maintained on schedule and get cared for well. The Japanese stuff got put in slightly more caring hands from the get go (because the people who don't care about spending a few extra grand up front tend to also be willing to pony up for more preventive maintenance) and then 20, 30, 40yr out proportionally slightly more of it is still around. Look at what's on the used market for Crown Vics vs what's on the used market for Grand Marquis if you want to see a great example of this. Even if you exclude cop and taxi vehicles Vics will all be clapped out compared to the GMs because they weren't mostly owned by gray hairs who treated them nicely.

You also have to consider whether a vehicle's customer demographic trades in frequently, trades in infrequently or sells private party. The first couple generations of minivans mostly got bought by rich suburbanites who traded them in after say 5ish yr. Exporters bought tons of them. You'd think they're unreliable because you never see them in the first world but there are tens/hundreds of thousands of happy 1995 Ford Aerostar and 2002 Honda CRV owners in places like South America. The lower class variants of those same types of vehicles say the 1999 Town and Country and the 2004 Santa Fe are still abundant om American roads because the buyers were generally less well off and more likely to sell private party.

Go browse bubble Taurus (3rd gen I think) and Subaru Outback sedans on Craigslist, see what kind of condition they're all in then do the same for their more utilitarian station wagon counterparts (and adjust by relative sales numbers) and you'll see how much the expected use case and lifetime of a vehicle is a self fulfilling prophecy. Sedans get used hard as commuter cars and then junked or sold depending on age. Wagons are useful so wagons stick around as long as they run and keep getting fixed as long as it's not something crazy.

One should also keep in mind that all the production stuff from the article only really applies to the first slope in the bath tub curve. Once the vehicles have been on the road 5yr they will either be fixed because they weren't built right or they will have been built right from the get go. How long the vehicles last after that is mostly a reflection of the design rather than the execution on that.

Source: Former low end car flipper, junkyard employee, and currently own a small fleet of random 80s-90s foreign and domestic non-enthusiast cars.

This is a very American point of view but you forgot that Japanese and other cars are sold all over the world and usually sold as cheap middle class type of car. Still, their reputation is the same all over the world where people don't maintain them more than they maintain a ford and certainly not maintained as premium European brands bought by upper middle class like BMW or Mercedes.

You touched the subject of design and this is also part of the reason, Toyota sells the largest number of cars in the world and have huge amount of data which they use to perfect the design and fix weak points, this helps a lot to make their cars last longer than other vehicles in the same price range and category.

> Vehicles last however long people keep fixing them and people keep fixing them as long as they expect them to last.

That doesn't explain why American cars have way more faults already in the first five years compared to Japanese cars though.

While I generally agree with most of your sociology observations, I feel you're heavily discounting the real impact to reliability that relates to design and specification differences between the domestics and Japanese auto-makers. In the 90's, I was a process engineer for an automotive wiring manufacturer supplying to both domestics and Japanese harness makers. The Japanese clients mandated cold-weld free segments for use in all of their cars with no exception. The domestics were ok with <=2. A cold-weld (physically crimped) going through hot/cold thermal cycles will eventually break in a car and is a messy quality risk because wiring controls a huge amount of car function and depending on where the weld ends up and whether it is a partial or complete break - can result in hard to diagnose failure symptoms (e.g. flaky lights, complete outage, etc ...). We used to charge more (which the Japanese clients happily absorbed) for the weld-free wire because the process lines would need to either be re-strung up for each pass (lower line utilization/efficiency) or we had to physically cut out the weld in the wire based on the detector's marking. This small difference in specifications and acceptance criteria will result in reliability differences downstream. I have no doubt that other suppliers could tell you equally divergent requirements which all may feel small in isolation, but amount to large reliability concerns for the system overall. While I understood the cost-control desire of the domestics, it always felt like a short-sighted decision to accept this type of risk systemically. It no doubt helps to have caring owners, but the reputation that draws them is based on design and specifications made early in the product's design life cycle.

Interesting Side-Note: When I first started, there was an anecdote/story about a weld that had made its way accidentally (weld detector inadvertently turned off for the wrong run) into a production lot. This lot was used in a late design life cycle batch run (~50K cars) for one of the large Japanese manufacturers who were planning on announcing a new design model year for the upcoming year. When the auto maker heard that this weld had made its way into the batch run, they gave our company two choices: Either buy the 50K cars or pay for the auto manufacturers engineers to comb through each car to validate the wiring was weld free. I don't know which choice was made, but the there were alot of human and mechanical systems put in place to make sure the weld detector and the client requirements were well marked and understood for all runs thereafter. It was a fireable offense to mess with that detector in any unauthorized way.

That's a hilarious story about the response to the potential of a defect.

the reliability of a car relates to how long something lasts while not doing fixing (normal maintenance can be expected). so your premise is wrong right out the gate.

Good observation,

But I want to add that Toyota can mean a dozen real manufacturers under a single brand.

Even in Japanese domestic market, there are "Junk" Toyotas, and Good Toyotas. There are good domestic market Toyotas made by external contractors, and there are bad Toyotas made by Toyota's own factories.

There are export grade Toyotas, made with export grade parts, and there are domestic market Toyotas with significantly different in design, and parts despite being sold under same model name.

And outside of Japan, there are many, many dozens of contract assembly plants ran by completely random people, assembling cars from very wide variety of parts, and doing many design, and spec changes.

By the way, what's the tool is there to detect cold welds in wiring?

An educator who manages a community college auto training program told me the most reliable car is the Toyota Yaris. It looks cheap, is cheap but because it's built to similar standards and has fewer parts it just doesn't break much.

That may have something to do with the consumers (who are influenced by marketing). People want to own expensive cars because that way they can feel they are better than their neighbor. Car -ride is a thrill especially in a fancy car. No?

I suspect that such extremely optimized design won't be accepted by consumer unless many enthusiasts exists like Tesla.

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