- Every year, Reuters pulls together their list
of the top 100 global innovators.
Companies like 3M, Boeing and Bayer,
they tend to dominate that list
with their many, many, patents.
But, do you ever see car companies
creeping their way up to the top of the list?
Heck yeah, you do.
(upbeat music)
Japanese automakers like Toyota, Nissan and Honda,
they keep using their big brains
to make more and more automotive related patents.
And that's not a new thing.
They've been doing that since the pre oil crisis times.
There are some basic creature comforts
we think of when we think of a modern day car.
First, we want big screen in the dash
to tell us where we're going and it better be touch screen
or else I'm gonna just freak out.
Second, we're gonna need a backup camera
because with these new A, B and C pillars
we can't even see what's going on back there.
Third, we want everything to be computerized,
optimized, not difficult for us to manage.
Finally, the car better last a long ass time
because they're expensive as heck these days.
Now what if I told you all those features
started life as cool new bell and whistles
on Japanese production cars a long, long time ago.
This is a grab bag of innovations
that not only pushed car tech into the modern era,
but literally laid the framework
that every other single car company built upon
to put you inside your comfy modern car
complete with all its computers and dohookies.
So today, we're gonna look at why every car
has some Japanese roots in it.
Let's go.
(upbeat music)
This episode is sponsored by Gran Turismo 7,
now available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
I think this means we made it.
- Hey Jerry, you see this comment?
- Yo, who's the best driver at Donut?
Huh, well, obviously it's me. - Me.
- It's me, Nolan.
- It's me.
- Obviously, it's me Nolan.
- What, you think you're better than me?
- Oh. I know I am.
- Well, why don't you prove it, Jerry?
- Oh, you name the time and the place, Nolan.
(echoing) Nolan, Nolan, Nolan.
- Gran Turismo 7, PS 5, right now.
- [Narrator] Player one.
- Jeremiah Burton, 22 years old.
If wrecking Nolan's wrong, I don't wanna be right.
- [Narrator] Player two.
- Nolan Sykes, not 22 and I'm about to bring the heat.
(flame thrower blazes)
(hooter buzzes)
It's going down, Jerry.
(thumping sounds)
(car revs)
(cars vroom)
- Stop ramming me, dude.
Gran Turismo 7 has always been the real
driving simulator and GT 7 is the best one yet.
- [Nolan] Buy, tune, race your way
through the solo campaign,
or if you love going head to head with friends,
you can compete in the GT sport mode like us.
- [Jerry] And thanks to the power of the PS 5,
you get the most realistic 420 cars
and over 90 tracks with dynamic weather conditions
in stunning 4k and HDR in 60 FPS.
- Whether you're playing on a SIM setup like us
or feeling all the subtle bumps on the road
on your dual sense, wireless controller,
Gran Turismo 7 helps you feel your position
on the road like no other racing game.
(cars vrooming)
- No, no, no, no, no.
No.
- Yes. Told you Jerry, I'm the best.
- Yeah, yeah. Rematch tomorrow?
- I'll be here.
- All right, I'm gonna get outta here.
Later, Nolan.
(car accelerates)
- It's the coolest thing I've ever seen.
(upbeat music)
- Let's start off with how cars are made in today's world.
The way we manufacture cars today
is very different from how it used to be done.
So back before World War II,
Harold and Charles would go to the Ford plant,
crank out everything they could every single day.
And then Mr. Henry Ford would take those final vehicles,
ship 'em off to dealerships.
And with that process, there'd be a lot of extra parts
all over the floor in all kinds of ways
going out the back door into the dumpsters.
It was controlled chaos, but the assembly line worked
and it was a huge improvement over cobbling together
each individual car one at a time.
Now, fast forward to the 50's
and Taiichi Ohno kicked it up a notch
and began his development on the Toyota production system.
Now this lean production system,
while not entirely a technological achievement,
was the framework that laid the path to modern
just-in-time methods of manufacturing.
This meant reducing defects, optimizing build lines
and not wasting time with errors and disruption.
The Toyota production system didn't just create
a new way for cars to be properly built.
It revolutionized manufacturing in general
and Ford was paying close attention
as Toyota unveiled their process to the world.
Decades after Toyota refined and conquered the process,
Ford, they were like, hey, we should do that.
We should use that and use it to develop the Ford Taurus.
(upbeat music)
The Taurus was a massive breakthrough for Ford
because it was the first automobile designed
and manufactured using the lean manufacturing process.
Oh-oh, pretty cool.
That's just how a whole car gets put together.
What about the individual pieces?
Where do they come from?
Well, one of the most taken for granted bits
on a car these days is navigation technology.
Now, we've had GPS on our phones
since I don't know, I've had an iPhone,
but back in the day I used to have to print
directions out on this website called MapQuest.
And as you were driving
you had to flip through pages of directions.
It was a (beep) wild time back then.
While nav tech started appearing
in all kinds of cars in the mid 2000's
it had been test running cars going back to the early 80's.
The first commercially available nav system was built
through a partnership of Honda, Alpine and Stanley Electric.
And unlike today's nav, it didn't use satellites
or GPS to get you around.
The electro gyrocator was an optional $2,746,
20 pound lump of technology
on the dash of your 1981 Honda Accord.
It used inertia to track where the car was going
through a helium gas gyroscope
that detected rotation and movement.
A clever little servo hooked into the transmission
and fed positioning speed and distance info
into the gyrocator.
All of this information was translated
to a six inch plastic map inside the housing
where a set of cross hairs would move around,
indicating where on a stationary map
you happened to be at that moment.
And it sort of worked.
Now the gyrocator didn't make it to a second year
of Honda production, but Honda kept trying.
10 years later, Toyota released the Soarer.
Here in the US, that's the Lexus SC.
I had an SC400, that car was (beep) sick.
I loved that thing.
Anyways, it had a similar nav system
that was now tapping into GPS systems
to verify actual locations.
And instead of a static map,
the Soarer's dash display showed maps
that were slightly more attractive than an Atari game.
And they were also more accurate.
Four years later, 1995 Oldsmobile released guide star.
(guitar riff)
The first American production map system,
and it utilized all the GPS goodness
the Soarer had been rocking for a few years.
Much like the Soarer, maps were preloaded
and a location was checked via satellite systems.
It was a big hit and within another decade
you wouldn't buy a car without an in dash display
that had nav.
And now we don't even give a (beep) about navigation
in our car, 'cause we use our phones.
So, take that.
And with a big monitor sitting on the dashboard,
why wouldn't you start piping in
some sweet closed circuit TV.
Back in the day, we used to have big bulbous windows
that were easy to see out of, but nowadays
cars have rules and those rules are for safety.
But safety has consequences and that means low visibility.
Kind of a weird thought.
We're gonna make cars be able to take crashes better
but they're gonna be harder to see out of,
so therefore they're gonna crash more.
Car safety people, how the turns had tabled.
Now, in the late 2000's regulators passed rules
that if a car finds itself tires up
the roof needs to be able to hold the weight
of the car up without crushing the occupants.
It's a noble rule and it's saved a bunch
of lives over the years,
but that rule sent the A, B and C pillars
off to the gym to (beep) get buff, like your boy.
Speaking of beef, if you wanna look buffer
go get you a Donut T-shirt like this.
See this guy's arms, see how beefy they are.
That's Vin Diesel, no big deal.
We're just a car YouTube channel with celebrities around.
This reduced visibility caused all kinds of problems.
Throw in the trendy, new bolster seats,
bigger headrests and smaller windows
and there's no way you're seeing
out the backside of your car.
Or if you do, you gotta do like one of these like uh,
like twisty things, and we don't do yoga.
A few concept cars throughout the ages
featured backup cameras, but they were expensive,
and really they were just garbage.
Toyota had a solution though.
And it came on the same 1991 Toyota Soarer
that had an in dash display
for it's fancy navigation system.
Toyota figured if they had the monitor,
why not add a rear view?
This particular Soarer was only available in Japan
and it featured the aptly named
electro multi-vision touch screen system.
Ooh, really rolls off the tongue.
Touch screens were insanely expensive back then
and mostly used for non-colored display interfaces
like old ATM screens,
but the Toyota EMV touch screen was clever.
It used a series of laser beams
fired from all different sides of the monitor
to track sticky little fingers and where they were poking.
The grid of infrared lasers would monitor things
as soon as you poked one of the images displayed
on the not really touchscreen, touchscreen.
It would know where on the XY axis you pushed
and would send that info to the computer
to make your selection.
Pretty fricking cool.
But what about the backup camera?
Well, it was 1991 and cameras at that time
were really, really expensive
if you wanted to do live feed stuff.
And we weren't working with film
because that would take just way too long.
Now, obviously you can't use a backup camera that has film
or have the top of the line 1991 broadcast camera
mounted in the back of your car.
So Toyota used a very early example of a CCD camera
and CCD is a charged coupled device
which is essentially a transistor light sensor
built into a circuit.
The sensor sees what you're about to back into
and sends those digital values
to the electro multi-vision touch screen
where they translated from digital code
back into an image of a 1990 Mustang GT bumper
that you're about to hit.
So, those are things inside the car.
What about under the hood?
Well, the mapping software and cameras
and fuel injection and everything else
wouldn't have been possible
unless the Japanese hadn't already developed
electronic controlled units in microcomputers
to do the dirty thinking work that cars need to do.
Today's cars contain hundreds of ECUs
and they all started back in the 1970s
with Ford begging Toshiba for some help.
The US Clean Air Act had sent everyone
into a little bit of a tizzy
and suddenly everything had to be more optimized,
not just to be cleaner, but to be more efficient.
And how do you get efficient?
Well, let a computer do the work for you.
In 1974, Ford introduced the EEC-1.
which integrated a Toshiba TLCS-12,
a 12 bit microprocessor
that had been around for a few years.
The system rocked 512 bits of RAM
and more than 2000 kilobytes of ROM,
which was kind of impressive at the time,
but is less powerful than the processor
in most common household coffee makers.
By 1978, they were stuffing these ECUs into Lincolns
where they were the first commercially available processors
to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
More than 40 years later, Ford is still rocking the EECs
and has moved on to the seventh generation
which powers the 2022 Mustangs and Ford F150s.
They're a little bit more advanced these days, obviously.
They use more powerful PC microcomputers
to manage entire processes in the car
from emissions to climate control,
but without the EEC-1 developed by Toshiba,
who knows where Ford would be right now.
Before World War II cars,
they didn't have the greatest lifespan.
If you'd baby the vehicle,
it would maybe eke out 40,000 to 50,000 miles.
That's nothing, nowadays.
It took a while to rack up 50,000 miles
but the cars would crap out after a few years
and be in desperate need of some replaced internals.
But why is that though?
That's the question, why?
Are engines just way better now?
Well, sort of, but the real key is oil.
The earliest automobiles had major problems
with cleaning oil.
Most cars had a mesh sieve stuck in front
of the oil pump intake to catch bits of metal
that would wear out and damage motor parts.
That metal mesh would keep large chunks of metal
from blowing up the motor
but they let all the tiny bits of metal
flow right through and bite into the smooth cylinder walls
and everywhere else that metal pieces
shouldn't be scratching around inside your engine.
Cars would prematurely wear out from damage
or clog up from their old oil no longer doing its job.
But in 1923 Purolator released the first filter
which revolutionized how the motors got clean.
Oil would flow through the filter,
but it was a bypass filter, meaning some oil got clean,
but the rest ran right past the filter
and kept gunking up the inside.
So you had to constantly clean out the Purolator filter
but it did extend engine life.
Up until 1943, almost all of those oil filters
were bypass types and were only filtering
about 10% of the engines oil at any time.
But in Japan, automakers, especially Toyota,
had been experimenting with oil filtration systems
that would filter 100% of the engines oil through a filter.
Toyota took the idea of Purolator's spin on oil filter
and mounted it directly on the engine block
so that every drop of oil would flow directly
through the filter.
It was a simple idea
but it was one that took engines instantly
from 50,000 mile lifespan to 200,000 mile lifespan.
The new full flow system was non-restrictive and efficient.
With engines filtering out 100% of the oil
and keeping things clean,
manufacturers could make them higher revving,
build them to tighter specifications
and make them all around much, much cooler.
I like cars. (cameras clicking)
You like cars.(cameras clicking)
We like cars.(cameras clicking)
Celebrating your love of cars
with the new "Spreading the joy of cars" t-shirt.
You get it in au natural, but also in vintage black.
Get it for the low, low price of 29.98,
only at donutmedia.com.
Check it out.
It's my favorite shirt to date.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of B2B.
Freaking love you.
If you liked this episode, please hit that like button.
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If you're interested in learning more
about Toyota's reliability secrets,
you can click right over here.
Nolan did a Wheelhouse about it, pretty cool.
You wanna see more stuff at Donut?
Follow us on Instagram @donutmedia.
Follow me @jeremiahburton.
And for those of you who happen to stick around
I'm gonna do, I'm gonna pull a Marvel.
I'm gonna do a bonus clip at the end of every B2B.
That is something that only you guys will see,
for those who stuck it out.
Thanks for watching. Bye for now.
Today's cars contained hundreds of ECUs
and they all started back in the 1970s
with Ford begging Toshiba for some help.
(laughs)
I got Nick to smile.
I did it guys. (clapping sound)
By the way, there's a picture of on set from us
doing that commercial and Austin's laughing,
Mario's laughing, Nick in the background, stone cold.
I'm getting everyone to laugh, but Nick,
oh, no he's a tough cookie to crack.
Well, my Ford sucking off Toshiba
really cracked a smile on his face. (laughs)