Key Takeaways
- Toyota invests heavily in development for reliable vehicles, like the iconic LS400 that set the bar for luxury cars.
- Toyota vehicles boast higher tolerances, making them ideal for emerging countries with harsh conditions and limited maintenance options.
- Toyota’s extensive pre-release testing process and commitment to customer feedback contribute to the industry-leading quality of their vehicles.
Anyone who knows anything will tell you that Toyotas are incredibly reliable. But ask them why, and they may draw a blank. They’ll most likely point to the proof rather than explaining what it is that makes a Toyota such a trooper. Maybe they’ll show you a Camry or a Tacoma that crossed half a million miles on the original engine and transmission, and that’s all well and good, but that doesn’t tell us why these vehicles can pack on the miles with no major breakdowns.
We could sit here and list reliable Toyotas until we’re blue in the face, but rather than just taking it for granted that you can count on a Toyota, let’s take a closer look at the legendary automaker and find out what makes it so special in the first place.
Toyota Is Not Afraid To Spend Money On Development
The LS400, the car that launched the Lexus brand, may be the most famous example of Toyota’s staggering development cycle. Before the first LS400s hit the market, their total cost was estimated at around a billion dollars. And you could feel all those millions as soon as you start driving the car.
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The development involved the cooperation of 1,400 engineers, 60 designers, 2,300 technicians, and 200 more support workers. From start to finish, the process took around five years, resulting in one of the most reliable luxury cars ever built. However, the LS400 was more than just its inherent reliability. It set the tone for Toyota’s luxury brand, showing potential customers that they can expect much more than just a simple badge-engineering job.
Higher Tolerances Make A Toyota More Attractive For Emerging Countries
It has been said that any car will last if you take care of it, but a Toyota will last no matter who’s driving it. This has a lot to do with the fact that Toyotas, especially those assembled in Japan, are known to be built to higher tolerances than comparable American and European cars. If a typical automaker builds a component within .05 inches of spec, a Japanese-made Toyota would be built within .01 inches of spec.
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If you live or work in an emerging country where pickups like the Tacoma, Tundra, and Hilux need to put in a lot of work. You might not be able to get to a garage and change the oil every 7,500 miles, this makes a Toyota a much more attractive prospect than a more delicate auto that can’t afford to skip any maintenance.
Toyota Conducts Extensive Testing Before Release
Toyota’s pre-release testing process sees them checking assembly by testing welds, rivets, and bolts on suspensions and body parts by randomly selecting candidates to tear down by air chisel. Engines are randomly chosen for constant rev tests, cranking them from idle to 6,000 rpms 200,000 times in a row, simulating forty years of use in a single test. Temperature testing, examination via x-ray, and even weather tests for interior components ensuring plastics and paneling in the cabin don’t crack in the winter all contribute to a car that’s already proven it can get to hell and back in one piece before it ever reaches the market.
They Actually Listen To Their Customers
In Japan, they have a business strategy they call Kaizen. This is an overall approach of constant improvement on every front, from the factory floor to the boardroom to customer service. The 1982 deal that merged Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. and Toyota Motor Sales Co., Ltd., launching the Toyota Motor Corporation, also saw the establishment of the Customer Relations Division, a department of the company whose sole purpose is to manage customer feedback and feed relevant customer input back to the development teams, informing the design of new models and iterations.
Toyota Boasts An Industry-Leading Production System and Quality Management
There is Kaizen, and then there is Jidoka. This translates to something along the lines of “automation with a human touch.” The mass production of a car made up of more than 30,000 parts demands that robots do most of the heavy lifting, but the Toyota production system follows a process of persistent quality control along the way. As Toyota themselves put it, “human wisdom and ingenuity are indispensable to delivering ever-better cars to customers.”
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Before automation, any tasks that can be conducted by hand are first conducted by hand so that workers know what they’re looking for. Any abnormality in production will bring the line to a complete halt, automatically or by human command, and the abnormality will be addressed before the line starts again, ensuring that the factory isn’t cranking out thousands of defective parts at a time.
Toyota Might Have The Best Supply Chain In The Business
Toyota was founded in the summer of 1937. August 28, 2024, will mark their 87th birthday. Over nearly a century of doing business in the automotive world, Toyota has established long-lasting relationships with suppliers, including Magnuson Products, Goodyear, and IPT Performance Transmission, among countless others in the US. In Japan, suppliers, including Nippon Denso Co., an air conditioner manufacturer, and Aisin Seiki Co., actually started out as Toyota subsidiaries before branching off as independents with Toyota’s blessing. One of the newer additions to the Toyota Rolodex would be Tesla Motors, after signing a $100 million deal to supply the RAV4 EV with powertrains.
Toyota Doesn’t Just Jump On A Bandwagon
Whether this or that factor is the number one reason Toyota is synonymous with reliability is hard to say. Still, the fact that they’re not big bandwagon jumpers is high on the list. Take, for instance, the new Toyota Camry. We’ve labeled this car the most important hybrid in the world, and we stand by that declaration.
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Toyota isn’t a brand given to bold artistic statements in design and production choices. It’s never been in a hurry to position itself as an early adopter. In short, if Toyota trusts that a hybrid-only approach is a smart way forward for one of its flagship models, that signals a major cultural and technological tipping point in the proliferation of the hybrid vehicle.
