Toyota execs rethink quality control
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From: C. E. White on 12 Jul 2010 08:32 Toyota execs rethink quality control Automaker defends record but takes steps to prevent problems Mark Rechtin Automotive News -- July 12, 2010 - 12:01 am ET TOYOTA CITY, Japan -- Chastened by a massive safety crisis, Toyota Motor Corp. executives last week unveiled a new round of quality-control measures. But several months into the uproar, they also remain defiant about the company's record and its methods. And as for allegations that an electronic software glitch causes unintended acceleration, Shinji Sekido, head of the company's Electronics Development Division No. 2, said: "We have not seen any phenomenon ... that would lead to [acceleration] failures." Toyota said it would increase by 1,000, or 50 percent, the number of engineers devoted to troubleshooting quality glitches. It also vowed to create a group of "devil's advocates" to check out customer complaints and to extend product development deadlines by up to a month to enable engineers to prevent problems at launch. Toyota also will communicate more with suppliers that develop key parts and will bring more r&d work back in-house from contract engineers. It also will conduct testing to try to determine how customers actually drive their cars. "The fast growth of the past decade has been too much in some areas for the company to keep up with," Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada told reporters at Toyota headquarters. He said future growth would be constrained by Toyota's engineering resources. The latest steps are an evolution of the "Customer First" philosophy initiated in 2007 under former President Katsuaki Watanabe and pushed forward by current chief Akio Toyoda. Katsutoshi Sakata, head of the new Design Quality Innovation division, said the new teams will take a "neutral stance" in their "early detection, early resolution" mission. "Our engineers did not pay sufficient attention to the customer's viewpoint," Sakata said. "We often believed our technology was correct. We need a calm eye to detect problems more readily." In developing new products, Toyota will rely less on virtual prototyping and computer-aided design and will revert to the old method of building more sheet metal prototypes to ferret out bugs before launch, Uchiyamada said. "We have to go back to the physical things; otherwise, we cannot anticipate and learn," he said. "If we are well-versed with physical product, then we can come back to the virtual prototype. You have to think about the feel of the car, which is hard to quantify, and rely on the human senses." More local engineers Toyota also will expand its quality effort in the United States and Canada by staffing seven field offices with extra engineers charged with investigating customer complaints. That staffing will be separate from Toyota's Swift Market Analysis Response Team, which has been scrutinizing customers' unintended-acceleration claims. Regional markets also will have more autonomy and authority in tracking quality bugs. In the past, local Toyota executives have said Japan was slow to respond to customer complaints. Now, the North American quality teams and executives have direct channels to the top executives in Japan, including Akio Toyoda. "Critical safety-related issues didn't rise to the top," said Dino Triantafyllos, regional product safety executive for Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America. "We are improving the decision-making process." The cost of those actions appears to be irrelevant. "The limitation of resources should never be an excuse," said Hiroaki Sunakawa, general manager of Toyota's Customer Quality Engineering division. Blaming the customer? Yet for all the new quality measures, Toyota executives defended their quality standards that nonetheless didn't prevent a string of recalls amounting to 10.8 million vehicles in the past year. Toyota executives downplayed the automaker's possible role in customer claims of unintended acceleration, the reason for the largest recalls. In evaluating the 3,600 U.S. customer claims of "speed control" flaws in Toyota vehicles, Sakata said the automaker had detected no instances of unintended acceleration due to electrical glitches. He said all claims evaluated so far were the result of a sticky accelerator pedal, faulty installation of the floor mat, a driver stepping on the gas instead of the brake or misuse of the car's cruise control function. At the development level, top engineers likewise found no cause for customer claims. In Toyota's electronics testing lab, engineers said they never have been able to re-create a case of unintended acceleration. Toyota's engine control software, which contains 800,000 lines of code, tests 280,000 "check items" per vehicle to ensure there are no bugs or glitches, Sekido said. He said engineers have been unable to produce a set of circumstances that causes unintended acceleration. "We are trying to create an adverse environment, all different scenarios, very stressful situations," Sekido said. There also have been allegations that electromagnetic interference could have caused Toyotas to zoom out of control. But Akihiko Nojima, project manager for Toyota's Electronics Laboratory division, said he never had seen that happen in thousands of hours of testing. In all cases of electromagnetic interference, Nojima said, the engine went into fail-safe mode, shutting the throttle. "No other company does such a complicated, troublesome test," Nojima said. In the case of actual product failures, Toyota has performed troubleshooting and enacted countermeasures as quickly as it could, Sunakawa said. He bristled at the suggestion that Toyota dallied for two years before recalling 270,000 Toyota and Lexus engines last week for possible valve spring failures. "We have done everything we could," Sunakawa said. "We didn't just sit back on a fence. We did tests. We did what was appropriate." Read more: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100712/OEM01/307129949/
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