How Toyota Changed The Way We Make Things

The Japanese Car Company is a corporate behemoth - but it's done much more than just give us Corollas or Land Cruisers. It's changed the way the world makes products. Here's how.

Video by Tom Gibson

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[shiddy.]

2010 Corolla, 360, 000 miles ... daily driver, survives Minnesota blizzards with -60 wind chill, still not a spot of rust ... still gets 45mpg on highway ... only mechanical failure since new is one alternator (less than $200) that took me 15 minutes to replace by myself using one socket/ratchet ... I think Toyota's build quality speaks for itself

[Cynthia_Cantrell]

My step-dad was a long time Ford pick-up truck owner. At some point later in life he ended up getting a used Corolla. He kept complaining that he wanted to get rid of it but the damn thing just wouldn't die!

[jsealey]

I'm surprised they didn't talk about how Toyota was the first to experiment with a modular design. They had 6 independent teams create an engine for the Prius given a predefined interface to the engine. The most efficient design made it to the final stage of production. They credit that process to the efficiency breakthrough of the hybrid Prius engine.

[ckilgore]

250 million cars made, and most of them are probably still

[mrbrightside]

Toyota and Honda. Two of the most reliable brand and hated by Machanic, because they can't make much money out of it lol.

[michaelgasperik]

My dad had an old Corolla. He bought it used and drove it 240 miles a day (round trip) to work and back. Went the engine finally quit running it had a little over a million miles on it. Toyota knows how to make a great car!

[mayorb]

In the late 80's I was at the Camry plant in Georgetown KY. The JIT in action was amazing. The supplier of the car seats had Toyota's production schedule weeks ahead. There was literally no staging area. The seats came off the semi trailers, and into the next car coming down the line.

[lameduck]

My 2003 Land Cruiser is approaching 300, 000mi. :)

[sutherlandA]

No mention of W Edwards Deming who helped and taught the japanese the processes that lead to Kaizan and JIT, the American big 3 ignored him so he took it where people would listen

[narlycharley]

200, 000 miles on my Lexus ES330 and Pontiac Vibe (Toyota Matrix).

[phadeblaq]

The reason Nissan, Toyota, and Honda have/had so much success in the US is due to the fact that they began designing cars with fuel efficiency in mind whereas American automakers were just looking to make cars for profit.

Greed has and is hurting America. How many US-made cars end up in junkyards compared to Japanese cars.

[Zarkdx]

No 10mm's were lost in the production of this video

[fargoloomis]

My corolla has over 300k and still runs great!

[felixniederhauser]

I am proud, that as a consultant I was part in thee Boeing JIT transformation using the Toyota Lean Model.
This really empowers people to be part of the process as thinking and profiting individuals, day by day.

[tristanmoller]

Having one worker be able to stop an entire production plant sounded crazy to my ears the first time I heard it. Still does in some way but apparently it works, so that’s great

[pheonixcollector]

My Toyota now clocked up 450K. Still going strong

[LimitedWard]

I don't think it's fair to say that kanban was a precursor to barcodes. They are two completely different things that serve completely different purposes. Kanban is a resource planning system. Barcodes are used for resource tracking. So really they serve different yet complementary purposes.

Also you can't "plan" a project with barcodes. That's what kanban is for.

[John-ygrt]

I learned about this in my operational management class. We went pretty in detail on some of the metrics Toyota used. Cool stuff

[shwontonsoup]

I went to a toyota/lexus plant last year near Fukuoka on an exchange trip. Those factories are crazy efficient, everything runs on the dot. Pretty impressive

[kevinarzola]

Boeing was a terrible example. They find errors and ignore them lol