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Originally posted by jsmith
how does that statement apply to the 70's and even early 80's when toyotas all rusted into the ground? in the meantime MB's from that era are still around today.
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They were behind. Consumers may have been asking for reliable long-lived cars, but the Japanese manufacturing technology had not caught up yet. Evidently they were working like buggers on it though, as their product quality was passing "Big Three" by the early 1980's and reaching the Germans by the early 1990's.
It is impossible for any industry to wake up one morning and create radically better products. It took time for the Japanese manufacturers to refine their production technology, educate generations of engineers and study other firms.
While I'm not a big fan of "Japanese" cars in general (few offer driving pleasure) I acknowledge their strides in reliability, quality at a low price, and marketing genius. Look at Honda. Those folks are brilliant. They don't have 300 models. They have a small car line, a family car line, a mini-van, and a couple sizes of Utes. Throw in the S2000 for bragging rights, and presto, a terrific model line up. Each line shares platforms and drivelines to minimize production costs. Consumers are not baffled by product overload.
In Japan, they also work very hard to ensure competition between their companies. They take anti-monoploy laws pretty seriously, and believe that the competition between Japanese firms is one of the primary drivers behind their competitive edge with the rest of the world. US firms thought that restrictive trade measures were to insulate Japanese firms from competition, but that was not the case. It was to ensure a home market for Japanese firms competing with each other.