Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

> I'm told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work

The “kanban” interfaces definitely originate from Toyota. Scrum was influenced by Toyota’s management techniques, among others. I believe other familiar concepts, e.g. “kaizen” or continuous improvement, also originate from Toyota.

My father worked for a defense manufacturer making airplanes and other stuff. One of his first projects was scheduling parts for manufacturing in the late 80s.

They joked at the time they used JIC (just in case) because they had so many random parts with no method to the madness. The scheduler worked out and they were able to move it off some high performance IBM (or similar) computer onto a PC that didn’t require a specialized IBM tech or support contract, written in C.

I wonder if Deming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Japan) contributed to the Toyota Way? A lot of the Toyota Way seems inspired by his teachings.

I am curious how many people are rethinking how aggressively to set up a JIT system in the wake of COVID and the supply chain issues, given it clearly cost many companies an astronomical amount of money in the end. Obviously you shouldn't build your entire company around rare, worst case scenarios, but there should probably be some consideration budgeted in for them IMO and it seems few companies were ready for rainy days.

A very very tiny (maybe not even applicable) example is how I always keep a camera or two when I buy new ones and don't sell them all off. You never know when your workhorse is going to breakdown. Just something I'm mulling over I guess!

It was mainly Taiichi Ohno who thought and created their production system and philosophy, not Toyoda.

That era's Corolla is legendary even now (though people tend to focus on the JDM version that had 2HP more). The GT86 was meant to be a tribute to it, although how well it succeeds is up for discussion.

Toyota isn't just "one of the worlds biggest car makers" it is THE biggest car maker on the planet.

They sell 25% more cars than the Volkswagen group (second biggest car maker on the planet) which includes Volkswagen, SEAT, Skoda, Porsche, Bentley and Audi and 50% more than Stellantins (which includes Fiat, Citroen, Peaugeot, Jeep, Ram, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Opel and another 6 manufacturers).

It's just impressive how many cars Toyota sells.

Toyota and Lexus also generally turn buyers into recurrent customers as few brands on this planet do.

If "no one got fired for buying Intel", I think it's fair to say that "no one got it wrong by buying a Toyota/Lexus". I just can't think any car manufacturer that gives you as much as Toyota for the price you pay.

It really is amazing. Another way to visualize this success is to consider how physically close you are to one of Toyota’s products right now, sort of a K-nearest neighbors idea. And how many of those were manufactured in Japan, and considered notable within their category (ex: 4Runner, RAV4 Prime).

My uncle still has a '93 Camry, to boot. I sent him that article like five years ago. He still has it. When it dies he will switch full-time to his backup vehicle, a 2005 Camry.

How is that non-satire?

It's no coincidence. Jobs was influenced by quality philosophers like Toyoda, Deming, etc.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kib6uXQsxBA

> it's incredible to see

From that statement, I'm guessing you've never owned a Camry?

>This seems similar in a sense.

They exist in very similar segments portions of their respective industries serving very similar customer demographics (in North America). Naturally there is going to be quite a bit of evolutionary convergence.

Toyota does not - and as far as I can tell, has never - led the world in cutting-edge technology. They are a very conservative company. This does not mean they have missed the boat. Even their hybrids were not first-to-market. Toyota did not invent the hybrid ICE/electric car; they simply implemented it better than their competitors.

Around 10 years ago, direct injection was the new thing for ICE vehicles. It improved engine efficiency at the cost of extra complexity. Toyota initially refused to add direct injection to their engines. Automotive writers at the time believed Toyota was falling behind with its outdated engine technology. They believed other automakers would surpass Toyota's efficiency.

What actually happened was a line of bad engines for VW, GM, and Kia/Hyundai. They lost a considerable amount of money and reputation due to engine failures caused by carbon buildup in their direct injected engines. Meanwhile, Toyota eventually launched their own implementation of direct injection. It was a combination of both high-pressure direct injection and port injection. The engine ran in different modes depending on the load and operating temperature. This gave them the same efficiency gains (though several years later than their competition) while avoiding the common failure modes of other companies' engines.

Don't write off the sleeping giant. Maybe Toyota will lose its dominance, or maybe they'll show up late to the party having learned from everyone else's mistakes.

I'm still in the camp that they did not in fact miss the boat on EVs. We, globally, are still very far off until EV adoption and probably better off focusing on more important things versus directly on EVs. Also Toyota was pioneer in EVs and I think you've discounted that if you're really looked at it on a bigger view of things

It's possible, yes. Empires rise. Empires fall. Toyota will adapt and 'missed the boat' implies that that's it; they're done. They're absolutely not done. They were also miles ahead of others when they introduced the Prius in the 90s. It's not as if they haven't been engineering and mass-producing electric powertrains for a long time. One strong reason they have not missed the boat? No one yet producing an EV right now even comes within arms-reach of Toyota's quality. People forget that it is, in fact, Toyota's legendary quality+reliability+value that makes it a brand people adore and come back to again, and again, and again. When they make an EV (and they will, eventually) that it is as good as the quality Toyota has built its foundation on, they will absolutely CRUSH it.

For the batteries in each EV, you could make 7 plug-in hybrids. That's 1 full electric and 6 gas cars, vs 7 plug-in hybrids.

I think Toyota's approach would save more emissions so long as we are battery constrained.

I think there’s enough time for them to catch up, look how far the Koreans have come in less than ten years

My Ioniq is a great EV (though dated) and it’s not even a pure EV platform (also available as PHEV and ICE). Toyota only need to throw the ICE out of a PHEV and increase battery size, and they‘ll have an EV that’s probably better build quality than 90% of the market.

> in how widely they've missed the boat on EVs.

They delivered a well-liked pure EV in the 90s that had a queue of people who wanted one. Chevron bought up a company with key battery patents, sued the RAV4 out of existence, wrote licensing arrangements such that no vehicle battery could be more than a couple of kWh in capacity, and went to court to have the results of their legal action kept quiet.

Toyota's hybrids have had the maximum battery allowed by that Chevron lawsuit. I am not surprised that they would be reluctant to get involved in being on any kind of electric leading edge again given that the evidence is that their entire product line could be destroyed on a whim.

Why would they lose their dominance? Are other manufacturers quality standards coming close to Toyota? I think not...

EVs don't work for me and my use case. I plan on keeping my Land Cruiser forever. My kids are starting to drive now, with one starting these past few months. In a Toyota, of course. As will the next two.

Toyota is building EVs, they just don't believe all-in on EV is what the market really wants right now.

Subaru is also building their EVs on Toyota's EV platform.

Someone from my family has a nice Toyota bought few years ago but the car has constant problems with Android Auto.

How can you make a car in 2018+ that does not work with the most popular smartphone OS?

Hah, I am waiting for Toyota to make a well reviewed EV to buy one. Otherwise, I am fine with their ICE/hybrid options.

Brand reputation is a positive feedback loop.

Better reputation -> charge more money -> poorer people who are gonna use your product at 11/10ths and try and skate by with the bare minimum of proactive maintenance buy it less -> the average example on the road is in better condition for its age -> high end consumers go "hey those things are lasting well I'll buy one" -> your average customer is richer so you don't have to cheap out in as many places on your product -> GoTo(step 2).

Of course the process needs to be kick started with a couple actual good products but once it takes off you're basically home free if you don't f it up.

The whole "the same GM car deprecated more" makes for great online virtue points from fanboys but it's not exactly illustrative of anything that isn't well known to be from other factors. The versions of otherwise identical cars that are preferred by higher end consumers will hold value better because they get treated better and kept nicer resulting in higher value at any given age/mileage. You can see this trend in action if you cross shop badge engineered cars that are old enough that purchase price no longer has any bearing on price.

There's an excellent episode of This American Life about the NUUMI experiment and why it failed to change GM.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

As an owner of BEV (Skoda Enyaq) I agree with this sentiment. My experience is that BEVs are expensive to purchase and expensive to use. This is a niche car for rich people, not Toyota Prius for common folk. I am currently getting rid of the car and going back to ICE because my whole experience was a painful joke.

Toyota is getting ridiculed today, but they will be last one who will be laughing, when prices for BEV and for batteries are currently going up [0]

[0] https://about.bnef.com/blog/increase-in-battery-prices-could...

The thing is that if Toyota wants to be a leader in this space, they should not wait for this to happen but be making it happen. The reality is that they have not been doing that. And others have.

If they wanted to be a leader in this space, five years ago would have been late to start putting in place the strategy, infrastructure, supply chains, etc. you need to build EVs. They did not do much five years ago other than insisting that they did not need to. And really, ten years ago would have been better, that's when Tesla started looking like a serious company and making concrete plans for scaling their business.

I don't see Toyota shipping EVs in volume any time soon. The new CEO is likely to have been tasked to actually start making this happen. But it's not going to happen overnight because they haven't built any factories yet, they haven't secured any battery supplies yet. They've built a few proof of concept / compliance cars that they are struggling to build in meaningful numbers and that they've had to withdraw from the market because of construction issues repeatedly. When they do start doing this, they'll have a little learning curve to master.

So, the new CEO has his work cut out.

As for being convinced about scale, the market volume is now millions of cars per year. Soon tens of millions. Tesla is a market leader with a target of getting to 2 million cars per year this year (up from 1 this year). And their cars are now the #1 best selling cars in many markets. They have really juicy margins on their products. It's a proven market with high margins and high volume at this point. Tesla is not alone in this market and there are quite a few other manufacturers also starting to move some serious volume. Any of those have what Toyota does not have: volume, scale, and proven products being sold as fast as they can be produced.

The technology is there. The infrastructure is there and rapidly expanding to keep up with supply and demand. New battery factories are being announced and opened all the time. We'll soon be measuring the collective output of these factories in twh per year rather than the hundreds of gwh per year it is right now.

Toyota if it wants in has a lot of catching up to do.

I think Toyota's issues will just be supply chain around battery packs. They have already been designing and engineering hybrids for a decade or more. I don't think its a revolutionary change for them to remove combustion engine and accessories and go with all electric motors plus larger battery packs. If anything it might simplify internal designs. I'd rather they flow this through their internal typical processes and come out with a product that meets their historical standards rather than any "catch up" to the market.

Once they have a Corolla like EV platform I bet it will outsell most competitors and likely won't have gimmicky features.

Volkswagen makes 10 million cars a year and they're pushing hard for EVs now.

The main difference between Volkswagen's and Toyota's situation is that Toyota is still in a good position to meet fleet emissions requirements globally because they've been selling hybrids for so long. But Volkswagen needs to pump out EVs now to meet their fleet emissions targets.

Fleet emissions fines are simply dead money. You're much better off putting that money into your EV development program.

Toyota has to sell EVs at scale eventually because new car ICE vehicle sales bans now and into the future mean that all car manufacturers have to.

Toyota is building one of the most reliable and robust cars for the masses. With attitude to build cars they will be competitive for very long.

Their current offering is "meh" from the EV perspective. It doesn't look like their experience with small-battery low-voltage hybrids gave them skills and experience to execute a good BEV. ICE reliability is a different game than batteries, efficiency, and software game of BEVs.

I think there's a high chance that Toyota will be sidelined by EV-first automakers from Korea and China just like US automakers were sidelined by Japanese automakers in the 20th century.

If Toyota misses the boat there's not much coming back from that. Once things shake out and brands develop reputations for certain classes of product it takes an act of god to change them.

In the 1970s the US was really good at making fairly luxurious barges but then suddenly the consumers wanted smaller cars. The US automakers already made compacts and small cars but they were value-engineered to within an inch of their lives for people who couldn't afford better. Japanese automakers absolutely killed because they already made "nice cars for nice people" in the form factors people wanted. The US had plenty of nicer cars in production at the time but they weren't form factors anybody wanted. So when you look at the average car that actually got bought and put on the roads the Japanese cars were nicer all around (and priced accordingly). The reputations took off from there and the US automakers got left holding the bag of low end customers and the Japanese carmakers got the high end customers further cementing their place in the midsize and compact car market. Minivans and then SUV becoming the "new hotness" for those buyer demographics and some by all accounts spectacular midsize car platforms of the 80s and 90s (Taurus, Escort, W-body (e.g. Lumina), Neon) still didn't unseat the Japanese car-makers dominance of the higher priced and higher end portions of the midsize and compact car market.

I would not bet against something similar happening to Toyota (and a couple other brands) with the transition to EVs. The big three look poised to capture the pickup and large SUV market. The Koreans look pretty well positioned in the crossover and hatchback segments. Tesla is king of high end sedans right now. I think there's room for another player in the crossover market and some room in the midsize SUV market (Honda Pilot, Ford Explorer type stuff) and there's probably room in the sedan market for a boring non-flashy EV (something Toyota already has a reputation for in the ICE segment). Will Toyota develop an EV or several that's a big enough winner to cement their place beside the current players in those segments? If I knew the answer to that question I'd be buying stocks.

Yep. Related to their principle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu