Toyota: Quality is Job One
When Toyota got slammed by Consumer Reports (and others) for declining product quality– the brand's raison d'etre– ToMoCo CEO Katsuaki Watanabe practically committed seppuku on the spot. Of course, he didn't; Watanabe said his company would do whatever was necessary to ensure that Toyota raised the bar for its product quality worldwide. Despite Toyota's southern plants, the man wasn't just whistling Dixie. Canada's Globe and Mail reports that the automaker has put the brakes on a new assembly plant in Woodstock, Ontario to ensure product quality. “We're very optimistic that we're going to have a good ramp up but I'm going to go slow,” admitted Ray Tanguay, president of Toyota of Canada. “Quality first before anything.” Either the Mail forgot to ask– or Toyota refused to reveal– the precise reason for the holdup. Perhaps, as the Mail hints, it's got more to do with the slowdown in the North American market. Or not. In which case, point taken.
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If the domestic 2.8 had the same mentality they wouldn't be in the terrible shape their in. But the domestic 2.8 are just the opposite, where the Japanese put quality first then profits second, the domestic 2.8 put profits first (make the share holders happy) then quality comes a very distant second. No womder they are losing customers so fast.
So those Tundra crankshafts were breaking in half due to poor final assembly quality control?
The actual bottom line on the Tundra's issue was not so much that they encountered a failure, but how they addressed the defect. Refer to http://www.autoblog.com/2007/05/31/toyota-expresses-regret-for-tundra-camshaft-failures-on-internet/ By contrast, how's that GM intake manifold class action suit faring, and how did it escalate to legal action again? See http://www.gmclassaction.ca/ Some are losing (have lost?) faith in the credibilty of the 2.8 for some reason.