Auto news on Youtube Dec 29 2018

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!