Thanks, Tim, and good points, too. The Japanese auto industry had
already started adopting W. Edwards Deming's techniques of quality
management by the early 1960's, and they had more manpower available
than they did high technology, at least at first. An interesting
side-effect of WWII was that most of their manufacturing capacity had
been destroyed and they were forced to rebuild from scratch, which meant
they could implement current equipment and not be "burdened" by obsolete
factories and machinery (look at the US steel industry for comparison
and why it lost out to foreigh competition).
Interesting observation I just remembered from a very knowledgeable
machinist I know. He said that he found it difficult to machine early
Japanese aluminum parts because the quality of the material was lower
than that in European cars. He felt the Japanese were able to get away
with using lower-quality material because their casting techniques were
far better. He described British casting techniqes as "primitive" by
comparison (and this from a guy who specializes in British and German
cars).
BTW, one of the big car magazines did an article on "affordable" V12
cars (used ones, of course). One of the things mentioned was that an
engine rebuild on a BMW V12 runs about $25K!!! Must be a definition of
"affordable" with which I'm unfamiliar.
T and E Corcoran wrote:
> Gordon,
> Nice article. One comment I would like to make when comparing early
> '60's
> Japanese cars to others is the effect of the cost of labor. All else
> being equal, if a production facility can throw extra manhours of
> labor into a product then the result can be a finer detailed product
> at a lower sales price. Government policies can help also, that's
> another topic. I believe that design and technology issues aside,
> Nissan could afford to compensate somewhat with labor intensive
> detailing and tooling alignments to produce a better product. On the
> other hand, something that was cheap to fix in the factory might be
> very expensive to repair at higher priced U.S. labor rates. (Replacing
> a 1500 starter comes to mind.) I think the very high cost european
> cars are that way because they had engineering, technology, and were
> labor intensive to produce.
> My two cents worth,
> Tim C.
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Gordon Glasgow
http://www.gordon-glasgow.org
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