Toyota

[selfishgene]

There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy

Comments

[polyanarch]

My 305,000-mile old Camry was made in 1983. It's still running perfectly fine and gets 27MPG combined city/highway mileage.

I'm not trading it in on some new American-made POS even IF Washington politicians claim it is a "clunker."

[squid314]

"There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy

[ilcylic]

The thing that makes it a fallacy is the word "thrive". Companies made products with deliberately engineered short end-of-life cycles. But they are not thriving.

American automotive products used to have much higher quality. But right around the end of the first Horsepower Wars, they seemed to give up.

[madfilkentist]

The answer to your question is that Toyota has a Japanese name. It doesn't even matter that these days Toyota employs lots of Americans; it's a foreign company, therefore protectionist politicans are against it.

It's now the leftists who are strategically limiting the life of cars to benefit the industry, through the "cash for clunkers" program. Jason Kuznicki wrote a good post showing how paying people to turn their cars in for scrap is an example of Bastiat's broken-window fallacy.

And I recommend the Positive Liberty blog in general; it has a lot of insightful posts.

[contrariandoer]

Why are American politicians not begging Toyota to take over American companies and introduce better management? Instead they ignore Toyota and praise incompetent wasteful companies that produce inferior cars.

There are labor unions involved. Politicians need to protect union jobs in order to be re-elected.

Besides, if Toyota takes over an American car company, workers won't be able to understand the Japanese managers that speak Engrish.

[selfishgene]

The best part is that almost all Toyota's managerial/workflow innovations stem from American ideas that were largely ignored in America itself.