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Toyota loses ideal amid auto woes
David Frum
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
Kai Ryssdal: There's this on the Toyota story to pass along today. The Transportation Department says it's hearing from Toyota drivers, whose cars have already been repaired, that they're still having problems. Acceleration of the unintended kind. No comment so far from the company on those new complaints.
These comments, though, from David Frum.
DAVID FRUM: Curiously shapeless, defiantly small, the first Toyota Corollas stood out amid the huge land yachts of the mid-1970s.
They said: I'm opting out of the Chevrolet-Oldsmobile-Buick status hierarchy. A car is transportation, that's all. I want reliability and mileage, not the pseudo-luxury of Ricardo Montalban's Corinthian leather.
It was not only the cars themselves that challenged Detroit: it was the way cars were made. Lifetime employment. Workers empowered to stop the line for a quality defect. Everyone eating in the same dining room, wearing the same coveralls. OK, the morning company calisthenics and anthem were a bit creepy, but otherwise, Toyota rebuked the worst practices of American labor-management relations.
Perhaps most important: In an era where the Ford Motor Company knowingly sold a fatally defective car, the Pinto, because it would cost too much to re-engineer it, Toyota epitomized quality above all.
A generation ago, Americans lived with a level of defect in their products almost unimaginable today. Refrigerator doors didn't close properly. Toasters burned out after six months. Eight-track cassettes unspooled all over the passenger seat.
The yearning for something better made an unlikely folk hero of Edward Deming. He was an American statistician who had arrived in Japan to assist with the first postwar census. Deming argued that quality could be engineered into products. Japanese companies listened. "Made in Japan" -- once a synonym for the cheap and breakable -- became an international guarantee of reliability.
Only after losing to the Japanese did American companies accept Deming's teachings. Zero defects began as a slogan, and grew into an expectation.
This global quality revolution was Toyota's doing as much as any single company's.
When those brakes slipped, they betrayed not only Toyota's customers, but an ideal.
RYSSDAL: Commentator David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Quality "revolution"? What quality revolution? Have you looked at our computers and electronics lately? Can you find a car made in 20 years ago that still runs well? How about a cell phone made in the last 5 years that lasts longer than 2 years? If anything, quality has been on the decline. And, Americans have been putting up with it more and more. Take cell phones: calls get dropped all the time, call quality barely allows you to understand the person at the other end, and god forbid if there is anything wrong with your billing, because you'll be stuck on the phone (ironic much?) for at least 2 hours with so-called "customer service" to straighten it out. Yet, we still keep going back for more.
Quality results from more competition and regulation. Toyota's problem stems from the fact that it is now the largest car manufacturer in the world, and it has enjoyed that title much longer than Detroit would care to admit. Hubris is the word that aptly comes to mind. I wonder who else the word "hubris" applies to, David Frum, speech writer for GW Bush?
Frum is promulgating the quality myth about early Toyota's. Actually those early Toyota Corolla's had unintended decelleration problems which the company similarly told customers that it was imaginary. My Aunt will never buy another Toyota because she had one of those "great" cars and was treated shoddily by Toyota and the dealers at the time (and yes the car was yellow).
David Frum credits Toyota for the quality revolution. Products liability lawsuits, Ralph Nader, and Consumer Reports, it seems, had nothing to do with it. A conservative partisan apparently cannot concede a role for law or government regulation in inducing deterrence and prevention. While such a skewed perspective is sadly disappointing, it's not surprising. But ignoring the value of information and disclosure (as provided by Consumer Reports, for example), is shocking.
While I think the overall thrust of this article is good I feel that MP has done Ford a disservice by perpetuating the myth that Ford knew there was something wrong with the Pintos. I would suggest reading "into "Madness" as a Flawed Landmark Narrative: An Organizational and Network Analysis", by Matthew T. Lee and M. David Ermann. Ford and Toyota do have something in common. In both cases the media storm was more significant that the actual problem.
