Toyota president pinpoints date of quality decline: 2003

[Omaha Steve]

Source: USA Today

The president of Toyota says 2003 was the turning point for the automaker's shocking decline in quality.

That's the point at which it passed 6 million vehicles and embarked on a growth curve that made it hard to apply the quality principles that made it such a force in the auto industry, President Akio Toyoda tells Automotive News in an interview.

He also says Toyota needs to wean itself off sales incentives in the U.S. and revive the sagging Scion youth brand.

Snip: He blames the company's inability to communicate with itself around the world for part of the problem. That problem has made it appear like Toyota has tried to hide its troubles.


Read more: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/05/toyota-president-pinpoints-date-of-quality-decline-2003/1

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Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corporation, addresses an automotive conference Wednesday, August 5, 2009, at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa near Traverse City, Michigan.

[PSPS]

1. Americans pinpoint date of oversight & regulation decline: 12/12/2000

That's the date the supreme court illegally installed bush into office. It's been downhill ever since.

[coffeenap]

2. +1 nt

[European Historian]

3. I dunno

Reagan was awful. Ditto Nixon. Clinton was Republican-lite, with his "New Economy." I was never exactly happy with Carter, the evangelical president. Last election I feel happy about? 1964, and even that one came with Vietnam.

[axollot]

5. And the last decent Republican - Eisenhower. He would be a pinko commie lib to the RW of today. n/t

[zenprole]

4. Hear, hear, European Historian

Yeah.

Dereg may have metastasized during the W years, but the destruction of democracy (and quality of life) in the US dates to the late Carter Administration. A sane future accounting will trace it to the combination of rapidly-growing corporate power buttressed by the psychobabble of Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss. Some of this precipitous decline might have been blunted if America had an opposition party, but that horse was out of the barn by about 1890.

Along those lines, today's Chris Hedges' article is worth reading, but only if you're in a strong frame of mind.

[elleng]

6. Good to hear they're seriously looking at this.