Hacker News Reader

> The age of the Chinese car is coming.

Globally, I'd say Japanese cars had a pretty good run.

However, they — Honda and Toyota atleast — seem to be hesitating with the EV transition. It's not like they don't have the engineering prowess.

View on HN

Japanese engineering has always fascinated me. It seems to be both revolutionary and conservative at the same time.

Because good process design doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like how Toyota was the only car maker able to keep going through the silicon shortage because they recognized the limits of lean manufacturing and that chips are not commodity items, as much as we like to think of them as one. So despite having everything that was a commodity as JIT lean manufacturing they still kept a massive stockpile on stuff that might become hard to source on hand.

TIL, thank you. A bit more about Toyota and silicon shortage: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...

There's a limit to what they could handle. They're hit by the shortage like everyone else now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com