rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about why Toyota makes such reliable
cars, what's the reasoning behind that, and I'll start out by telling you the
truth nobody's sponsoring this, Toyota isn't
sponsoring this, I've been a mechanic for 51 years
look at my driveway, I've got a 1994 Celica, a 2007 Toyota Matrix, and a 2002
Lexus, and I bought all these vehicles used, now why did i buy toyota products
Lexus is a toyota product, let's not mash names there, well
precisely because I am a mechanic, Monday through Friday I spend all my time
fixing other people's cars, do you really think Saturday and Sunday I want to have
to fix my own cars, I want the most reliable cars so I don't have to work on
the things, even though I buy them used I hardly ever have to do anything to them
anyway, now why are the Toyota line reliable, well you have to understand
it's a different culture, I got a master's degree from the University of
Illinois and some of the stuff I studied was Asian business, being a Japanese
company Toyota was always thinking towards the future, they're thinking
sometimes even decades ahead, where American manufacturers hey, like most
American corporations, especially ones that are publicly traded, they're worried
about the stock price, so they're thinking about the quarterly reports
sometimes they're only thinking three months ahead, not three decades ahead
there's a real difference there between short term and long term profits too, take
Toyota in the 70s and 80s, people accused them of dumping their small pickup
trucks on the United States, they certainly didn't cost much back then, they do
today but they didn't used to, they built themselves up a market of people who
like their little trucks, wanted a dependable little truck, so they sold a
whole bunch of them, yeah they certainly didn't make that much money in the
beginning selling those trucks, but they sure as heck do now, they built up a
market by just improving their vehicles little bits at a time, I remember when I
was a young mechanic in the 60's everybody laughed at the Japanese stuff
and said, oh those little rice burners, those little puddle jumpers what
good are they, well sometimes being conservative pays off in a business
world, Toyota never really made a v8 pickup truck
until the tundra, they were originally gonna call it the t-150 but ford
threatened to sue them so they dropped off on that and decided to call it the
tundra, they were worried that they weren't gonna be able to sell them
in large enough volume, they started making them in Indiana where they used to make
their forklift trucks, so they came in very conservative, they ended up selling
all the ones they made, and they just started making more and more as people
saw, Wow a reliable Japanese large pickup truck with a v8 engine, that's not their
main market you know they're not gonna be beating Ford and selling v8 pickup
trucks like the f-150, that's a real American thing and they've been building
those f-150s for decades to perfecting them as time goes on, but the tundra
shows one basic thing about Toyota, they were conservative they started with, okay
we'll try v8 trucks now and a small amount, then as they got popular they
started making more and selling more, even though big trucks weren't really in their
market, their more into cars to get people around in, that's where they were making
most of their profit, look at the camrys and Corollas they sold millions and millions
of those things, and really when you look at them they weren't particularly
good-looking, and they didn't ride all that well in the beginning, but they just
didn't break down, and a lot of it has to do with their entire manufacturing setup
in Japan they don't have the big labor versus management fight like in the
United States where they're going at it tooth and nail, in Japan a good factory
job was seen as a lifetime thing, the people would go on summer vacations
together and they would all be treated fine, and there wasn't this, oh we're the
workers and the management is screwing us over, it's a completely
different scenario than it is in the United States, and let's face it if you
have a happy labor force and you keep incrementally making your vehicles
better and better and perfecting them and then
trying new things every once in a while but doing it conservatively, your
vehicles are probably going to come off the line put together better than they
are in a different scenario, where the management and the workers are at each
other all the time, hey I've even had private conversations
with businessmen in the United States working for large corporations, and they
said Scotty we can't compete with the Japanese on the same level, because they
just have a different Society, they'd say the pressure for short-term profit was
really high in the United States, and there are always trying to maximize that
whether it be lowering the quality of parts in cars to save money, or paying
the guys who built them less money, and if you think about it both of those are
not such a hot idea, you don't want lower quality parts and you
don't want people who are building getting paid less and less as time goes on, so if
your main focus is not, how can we make more profit by either cutting the
quality of our products, paying the workers less, you're gonna make better
quality vehicles that's just common sense, now me I admit it I'm a
cheapskate, all these Toyota's and Lexus's I bought, I bought them used but since
the Toyotas are so well made, you can buy one it's got some mileage on it and
still drive it for years, I mean I've had my own customers sometimes arguing with
me in saying, oh I'm happy with my Chrysler I haven't had any problems with it and
then I say, well how many miles do you have on it and they'll say well we've got
30,000 miles on it, and I just laugh and say, hey
call me up when you got a hundred thousand or if it makes it to 150,000 and
you spend a ton of money fixing it, and over the
last three decades, really I haven't personally found anything that's more
reliable for the money then the Toyota products are, and I just hope that they
don't start following the Americans, but sadly I see a little bit of that in the
newer Toyotas, I see things breaking long before they used too, I've seen power door
locks break on cars there were only two three years old, I see water pumps go
bad on vehicles that had maybe 40,000 miles on them, but let's hope that that's just
a fluke and they don't follow down the line of planned obsolescence and start
making cars that break down before their time, so if you never want to miss
another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!