Auto manufacturing quiz

Comment: This may surprise you ...

The US-sold Toyota Sequoia:

• Where are the engines manufactured?
  
• Where are the transmissions manufactured?
  
• Where are the vehicles assembled?
  
  

The cars and trucks that are currently built in __________

In-depth look at Toyota's sticky accelerator

HT: autoblog.com

Comment: My sister has a new Camry that has been recalled

GM vs Toyota labor costs

Comment: Below is a link from NPS that compares GM to Toyota. The data is not current (c 2005), but highlights one of the real issues with GM - the high cost of labor.

NPR: GM vs. Toyota: By the Numbers

Excerpts:

Profitability per Vehicle

GM: Loses $2,331 per vehicle
Toyota: Makes $1,488 per vehicle


Production Time per Vehicle

GM: 34.3 hours, 2.5% improvement since 2003
Toyota: 27.9 hours, 5.5% improvement since 2003


Average Hourly Salary for Non-Skilled, Assembly Line Worker

GM: $31.35/hour (NOTE: Includes idle workers still on payroll.)
Toyota: $27/hour (NOTE: Includes year-end bonus.)


Average Labor Cost per U.S. Hourly Worker

GM: $73.73
Toyota: $48

Comment: Unless GM (and Ford and Chrysler) AND the U.A.W. deal with labor costs, no amount of bailout money will help them.

"Danger Zone" Yaris

Toyota Yaris flies into the danger zone, drives off aircraft carrier

Excerpt:

Toyota is hitting the boob tube hard to advertise its sub-compact Yaris, and the Japanese automaker has found its funny bone in these newest spots. The overall theme of the new campaign is that the Yaris is clever enough to do "almost anything" by demonstrating the few things this little three-door can't. One commercial ... puts the Yaris on the deck of an aircraft carrier where it attempts to take off after getting the OK from flight control. As you might have guessed, the Yaris can't fly, so the Little hatch goes overbooard into the drink

Comment: My Mother has a 4 door Yaris. It is a cute, reliable car. I wouldn't want to drive it hundreds of miles, but around town (when we visited her in Dallas) it is functional and gets great gasoline mileage.

andon, kanban, kaizen

The open secret of success: Toyota turns the concept of innovation on its head, shares it and still wins

Excerpt:

According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small — making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say — and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.

The system doesn’t necessarily preclude missteps — in 2006, Toyota ran into a series of quality problems — and it’s possible that the focus on incremental innovation would be less well suited to businesses driven by large technological leaps. But, on the whole, the results are hard to argue with. They’re also phenomenally difficult to duplicate.

In part, this is because most companies are still organized in a very top-down manner, and have a hard time handing responsibility to front-line workers. But it’s also because the fundamental ethos of kaizen — slow and steady improvement — runs counter to the way that most companies think about change. Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you’ll be thin for life.

The Toyota approach is more like a regular, sustained diet — less immediately dramatic but, as everyone knows, much harder to sustain. In the 1990s, a McKinsey study of companies that had put quality-improvement programs in place found that two-thirds abandoned them as failures. Toyota’s innovative methods may seem mundane, but their sheer relentlessness defeats many companies. That’s why Toyota can afford to hide in plain sight: It knows the system is easy to understand but hard to follow.


Comment: Good read.