Jewish Atheist

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

W. Edwards Deming
Inc. Magazine, Feb. 1987

There is a kind of rough justice to the precipitous fall of Toyota. For decades, they kicked our asses in automotive quality. Detroit could have produced quality, but it wasn’t profitable enough, so the policy was to ship crap out the door (built by sullen, devalued autoworkers) and let the dealers take care of it, because there’d always be new sheet metal next year. And new customers. That was Alfred Sloan’s brilliant concept: the yearly model change, cars as fashion goods.

Couldn’t get it right

Of course, along the way, Detroit came up with some significant automotive innovations — air conditioning, power brakes/steering, automatic transmissions — and the cars’ long-term reliability was good. It was just that goddamned quality that the Big Three couldn’t get right — or didn’t care to. So for customers, it was back to the dealership for problems that got fixed — or didn’t, because there was an inherent design flaw or a parts defect. The result: lots of customers pissed off. One friend jokingly told me the GM dealership had issued him his own coveralls, with “Stan” embroidered on the front. Soon after, he bought a Lexus.

Detroit began to get the message in the late 70s, when the Japanese began exporting quality cars to the US. GM sent its Quality people to, yes, Toyota — five times. They couldn’t believe the numbers. How could people build cars with so few defects? First they thought it was the Japanese culture (it was, but that comes in later and figures mightily in the current controversy). Then the Japanese began building cars in the US, with American workers. And they still kicked our asses.

The answer

Ultimately Detroit figured it out: it was Japanese management and mastery of manufacturing processes that were killing the American automakers.

On the management side, they seemed to treat people better. There was respect for the worker, the consumer and the product, something sadly lacking in Detroit. In the Japanese system, a worker could stop the line if there was a quality problem. Unheard of in Detroit. Ship the crap out the door, meet quota, go home, job guaranteed for life.

As for process, the richest irony of all was that the transition from “Japanese crap” to “Japanese quality” was, in the auto industry, driven by one man: W. Edwards Deming, an American quality statistician who correctly identified management as having the lion’s share (85%) of the responsibility for quality.

Could care less

Detroit could care less about Deming’s message. It was getting rich putting on new sheet metal every year. But they produced the same lousy quality that sent consumers back to their dealerships over and over. As noted above, these same problems, especially if they originated in defects of parts or flaws in design (e.g., putting one component too close to another), could be unfixable and led to Lemon Laws. That’s how bad American quality was.

GM did a complete turnaround and started consulting Deming. I met the Prophet at a GM Quality seminar. He was in his 90s, still angry. When an audience member asked him what he thought of the future of American management, he said, with a sneer, “What future?”

Eventually, Detroit started playing catch-up, but way too late. In the late 70s and early 80s, GM engaged in a joint manufacturing venture with, yes, Toyota, so they could learn the system from the inside out. Japanese quality jargon — kaizen, kanban, just-in-time supply — peppered the speech of American managers and executives. It still took GM a LONG time to catch up, because they still had the same bureaucracy and the same workers (although a lot less of each).

But too little, too late. They’d lost a whole generation of customers. At some point, American car buyers got too busy to keep schlepping back to the dealership, too stressed, too fed up…and when the Japanese listened to Deming (did they ever — they have a quality medal named for him), they started building quality cars that consumers were ready for. What a breath of fresh air!! A car where nothing went wrong!

Predatory capitalism

Meanwhile, the Japanese prospered, let us not forget, by practicing predatory capitalism, with tough protection for local industries, export-led growth, barriers to foreign entry, and elaborate interlocking cartels called keiretsu. They kicked ass by fighting dirty. The whole structure was built on the back of the ever-loyal “salaryman,” who worked and drank himself to death (karoshi), all for the company. Such loyalty! Imagine how American workers felt, having to sing the company song of their Japanese masters. And for a while, the Japanese were pretty scary. Remember Michael Crichton’s unsettling novel Rising Sun? Or The Japan That Can Say “No”?

But they are scary no more. And their apparently benign, humanistic model of employee behavior was just servility in disguise, as American workers at Toyota plants have found out.

And now one of the biggest has taken a huge hit. Of Toyota’s fall, I could say the same thing as of the many GM miscues: SOMEBODY KNEW. Of course they knew. These things don’t happen magically or by surprise, but because of denial. A car has some 15,000 parts, each of which is engineeered, manufactured, tested, and vetted repeatedly. Somebody knew. Probably numerous somebodies. But the bosses didn’t want to know. And what the boss wants and doesn’t want to know…defines reality. Then ADD to that a repressive Japanese loyalty culture in which “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” That’s how something like this could be swept under the carpet (no pun intended) all these years.

Stopping and going: basic car functions

And it’s happened more than once, which is really going to kill Toyota’s reputation. Every time I get into my Acura, I do NOT worry about whether the damned thing’s going to take off on me or fail to brake. Those are the TWO most basic safety systems. Without them, the driver has no control.

How can Toyota owners get into their cars each morning? Incredibly, many are still loyal. This kind of brand loyalty is far from innocuous, unlike the believe-no-matter-what attitude that accompanies Cubs fandom. It can cost you your life. But still they believe. If I had a Toyota, I would sell it to the first sucker — sorry, buyer — today, if possible.

Chicago Trib columnist Mary Schmich (2.26.10) reports on the loyalty that endures in the face of reality, which is that a certain number of these vehicles will kill their drivers/passengers. Yet still they believe! One of her readers says that Toyota “might need a new PR department…but they darned sure can make a car.”

This from an actual attorney, an authority on spinning reality.

The poor man totally reverses image and reality. SO post-modern. Mr. Lawyer-man, Toyota PR is just fine, very professional, I’m sure, no doubt a bit overworked these days. It’s THE REALITY that’s the problem. The cars accelerate. The brakes fail.

No, no, NO, it is NOT the job of PR to create a story you would like to believe, regardless of whether it’s true. The job of PR is to make sure the company’s efforts and good works are appreciated…and, if the occasion arises, to minimize damage to its image by telling THE TRUTH. QUICKLY. He has it exactly bass-ackwards.

Message to Toyoda-san

Here, Toyoda-san, is the depth of your sin. You have taken from your buyers the fundamental sense of security they require when they get into one of your cars: that it will respond to their commands to stop and go. Now matter how fast you fix it, there will be more accidents. With each one, your reputation plummets.

I can only guess, but you would really know: How the hell did it spread to millions of vehicles over five or more years? If a company is honest about defects, it will announce and fix them quickly, limiting the damage. How could you have allowed this to have spread to so many car lines?

So it’s not enough for you to stand before Congress and smarmily apologize. We know you still despise us, the smelly, hairy gaijin. You’ve competed like a samurai - all-out war. You’ve kicked our asses like a true practitioner of the warrior code of bushido.

Now you’ve fucked up, and you must do what the failed samurai does: seppuku. Ritual suicide. Let’s see some real regret. Rip your guts out. Perferably on YouTube.

PS. On the same day (2.28.10) on which the Tribune reports “Tales of terror, loss in Toyotas” (with the disturbing subtitle that “Many of the victims were driving models not included in recent recalls”), the horrific stories of some of the 56 people who died in accidents involving unintended acceleration, columnist Steve Chapman defends Toyotas as being quite safe, not to worry, your real concern should be with the things that are most likely to kill you, e.g., drunken driving (yours and others’) or driving at unsafe speeds.

Chapman is right when he says we should really worry more about the things that we can control and the misfortunes that are more likely to befall us. I am familiar with the misperception of risk, with the idea that people are more afraid of getting hit by lightning than of being 50 pounds overweight. Nevertheless, Chapman is wrong to structure the risks in this manner. He says worrying about getting killed by unintended acceleration is like worrying “that you are going to die of a spider bite while climbing a ladder onto your roof.”

This is a subtle but, in this case, deadly logical fallacy. Yes, you could fall off your roof, and yes, that is more likely than dying of a spider bite. But Chapman constructs the analogy in a misleading manner. What if your roof’s crawling with poisonous spiders, any one of which could dispatch you with a single bite? Now you’ve got two problems, equally worrisome.

Which brings me to the real fallacy, namely, that this is not an either/or proposition. The two scenarios are not mutually exclusive. You have the (undeterminable) prospect of dying from drunk driving AND the increased probability of dying from unintended acceleration (significant, because the defects are so widespread). Toyota has added to the number of things that risk your life — and that are beyond your control. Chapman should not be complacent — he should be more worried than ever.