Yes, there is a difference between American and Japanese cars

snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news:1500-4DFFB89B-14150@storefull-

3171.bay.webtv.net:

Excerpt: "The manifest ineptness on the part of Toyota in dealing with the unintended acceleration crisis..."

Lutz's comment is completely unfair. What he fails to realize is that it's impossible to reason with a lynch mob.

And considering that zero (0) people crashed, died, or were injured on account of "unintended acceleration" caused by anything Toyota did or did not do, Toyota was /definitely/ lynched. Even the US government joined the lynch mob, with no apologies after the truth came out.

I generally like Lutz's outspokenness, but I'm disappointed in him with his comments in that article.

there's WAAAAAY too much government-led bullshit propaganda in the media at the moment. i heard an in-depth article on npr a few weeks back about the chevy cruz, how it was gm's fastest selling car, and how it was the beacon to their shining bright future. they even had an interview with someone purporting to be a showroom sales dude saying how fast these things were moving off the lot and how chevy had "really got it right this time".

now, i'd never heard of or seen the chevy cruz, so i looked it up on the interweb. sure enough, i /had/ never seen one of these things. and because i'm a dysfunctional pedant, i've been looking out for one ever since. and i still haven't seen even a single car.

so, either we here in the san fran bay area are living in some kind of sanitized bubble where border patrols keep all the non-merc/bmw/honda/toyota/kia vehicles strictly east of the sierras [and south of fresno] and these things really are selling back in the heartlands, or this story was a fabrication of the same magnitude and shamelessness as the toyota witch hunt. my eyes lead me to believe the latter.

San Fran bay eyes only see what they can see. Here's the numbers for May,

The Jap car "unintended acceleration" scare is over. Now it's radioactivity keeping customers away.

--Vic

He also fails to explain how Chrysler, Ford, or GM would have handled a situation of this magnitude. Toyota paid dealers to work 24 hours a day on the "problem", and the head of one large DC-Virgina dealer of several brands said none of the other manufacturers has ever taken problems as seriously. Also Lutz should realize that Toyota now is more like Intel in the 1980s, and back then, Intel was on the ropes because of the Japanese chip companies. And there's no evidence that Detroit now is as competitive as those Japanese chip makers of the

1980s were.

i know the reported sales figures, but truthfully, have you actually seen one? i haven't, and not just for the bay area, but sacramento, and all the way up to southern oregon. not one. i even asked a friend in los angeles [he'd happened to have heard the same npr report], and he hasn't seen one either. it's not like l.a. doesn't have many cars.

yeah, right. you'll get more radioactivity going down and breathing the radon in uncle frank's basement.

Actually you picked the one comment that was pretty spot on. The others were rather wrong, but no that one.

Japanese companies don't understand a particular irrationality of americans. Americans by and large expect something to be done immediately.. they don't care about details such as if it fixes the problem or not... or even if makes things worse, they want something done. This is why we have the TSA, tire pressure monitors, countless government programs and agencies, tons of regulation, various wars in progress, and so on... because people want something 'done about it' and the US government takes full advantage. Essentially americans want to see a fix, no matter how slip shod or more damaging than the original problem immediately. That is if the attempt to cover up the problem failed.

Japanese culture on the other hand tends to cause people to deny there is a problem in the first place and then quietly fix it hoping nobody will notice. The fix will generally be a reasonable step or kludge that actually does at the very least make things better. Even when it doesn't things don't usually get worse and nobody seems to use it as a chance to expand their power. There is a sense of shame there was an error or problem in the first place.

I've seen this time and time again through my career (I deal with people world wide and have grown an understanding of the various cultures) and the way the whole toyota thing played out especially with the government getting involved was a classic clash of how the two cultures operate.

Because that stuff is done quietly. If GM did it there would be a TV commerical making sure everyone knew they did.

Mr. Lutz also failed to explain why there are no domestics in the top five sellers (passenger cars) for this year so far. (and most of the rest of the top 10 aren't domestics either)

The cruze is the current name for the cavalier. It's just another bland toaster mobile... It's the kind of car that one notices only upon reading badges.

then they're selling them without badges and with a different body kit that says "dodge" or something, because i've still not seen one. it's not like you can't find pics on the interwebs so you know what you're looking for.

Brent wrote in news:itp88t$ss9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

But... THERE WAS NOTHING TO FIX. That was Toyota's problem, just like with Audi in the '80s with their "unintended acceleration": there was NOTHING WRONG WITH THE CAR.

The one thing that /was/ wrong was the lynch-mentality of the media, and, in Toyota's case, the lynch-mentality of the government as well.

Brent wrote in news:itp8jc$ss9$2@dont- email.me:

Long before that dumb cop in San Diego died, Toyota did discover a problem with electronic gas-pedal assemblies made in Canada. A running change was implemented, the revised assemblies having a white dot painted on one side of the the housing to indicate the presence of the updated hardware. Running changes are done /all/ the time in the auto industry, and this was just one of many.

Toyota never did that because it was a routine product revision, of the sort that are done all the time, even to this very second. And because no crashes or other serious problems had ever happened to any customers' cars.

The one-and-only incident that was definitively tied to the gas pedal (the SD cop) was caused by a dealership, which installed incorrect and unsecured floormats in their loaner Camry, then failed to address the report from the previous customer that he'd had the mats bunch-up on him and make the gas pedal stick.

Just like Audi, Toyota was up against a lynch mob. There is no reasoning with a lynch mob.

On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:54:26 -0700, jim beam wrote:

Well, I sat in one a couple weeks ago at the dealership when I was picking up parts for my Lumina. The Cruze has 10 air bags. Other than that it has the Ecotec engine. Don't remember anything else, even much of what it looked like. It's new, so it'll take a while for the numbers to build. Since I retired I hardly drive except for my annual trek to Florida. I do notice what brands are on those roads, as an anti-boredom remedy. Besides that most of the cheap cars like the Cruze, Civic, Corolla all look pretty much the same to me, and I was never one to ID cars after fins went away. Just never cared much except about my own car. I'll ask my kid and wife, who drive every day and are more car model conscious than me, if they've seen a Craze. Once I have a comfortable ride that I can keep mechanically sound I pretty much forget about cars for 6-10 years until what I haves rusts out. Except for reading about them. I've not even been in a Toyota in my life. Never. Had one short lunch ride in a Civic, and one in an Accord. My point is what cars you see is pretty much local and doesn't tell the sales story except locally. A couple years ago GM had 20% of the U.S. market. But California was less than 13%. My suburban Chicago neighborhood is skewed toward Toyota/Honda. But when I get on the interstate outside of Chicago I'm suddenly seeing a whole bunch of Impalas and Mali bus. When I get to Tennessee I see more Chromo models in 50 miles than I saw the entire previous 4-500 miles. You can believe your eyes or believe sales numbers.

--Vic

well, if you believe the propaganda, the numbers have already "built".

and you may have sat in one, but you didn't buy one and are not driving one. and apparently neither is anyone else.

right, but you've seen honda and toyota on the road. have you seen a cruze on the road?

eyes. these much propaganda'd sales numbers are as reliable as official unemployment statistics.

Huh? The car just went on sale in U.S. about 7 months ago. I posted sales figures for May, about 20k, There's millions of its competitors running around. And you're in California.

As I said, I hardly drive. My son said he's seen 3 or 4. Chevy in front, Corolla in back according to him. Aerodynamic constraints have cars looking pretty much the same.

Right. In my old Chicago neighborhood Corsicas outnumbered Corollas

5:1. That meant Corollas weren't selling. The Corolla sales numbers were "'propaganda."

--Vic

Even if that were true, it is irrelevant to the american irrationality I was describing. It is functionally impossible to stop people from boarding aircraft with weapons on the order of box cutters, so in that sense there was nothing wrong with airline security, but a fix was still demanded by the irrational bedwetters that now make up "the american public".

It's a fascist (corporatist) system, of course the government that bails out GM is going to go in like a shark that smells blood.

it's not a "california" thing. chevy's aveo is very much in evidence here [despite only ~2700 per month sold per month in jan and feb], and i've even seen a number of volts [total of 1800 for jan and feb]. but cruze? they recon they sold 13,631 in january alone - so where the heck are they?

They are common in every industry. I have been dealing with Japanese companies for many years, it's a different engineering/manufacturing culture. Changes are done, even internally to the same company, quietly.

You seem to be intentionally missing my point. I am not faulting toyota, I am describing cultural differences. What Toyota did works fine in Japan. In the US the irrational ignorant bedwetters that have been driving the culture and media for the last 30 years or so don't like that. They don't care and don't understand quiet fixes. They don't understand product development and manufacturing nor are they going to or even try to. The media fans the flames because the culture eats it up... this 'unsafe at any speed' rolling over SUV nonsense that just keeps growing like a cancer in the society. They want fixes and they want them now. The government exploits this over and over again... hell their fingerprints are all over creating the problems so that they can offer the solutions. "Never waste a crisis" is a now famous quote too.

Probably in Bakersfield.

--Vic

lol!