Page 198 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

as Tundra, Sequoia, Sienna, Avalon, and Venza, often use com-
mon pieces of design and engineering from other vehicles. Of
course, core technologies like engines, hybrid drive systems, and
vehicle control electronics are also developed at headquarters in
Japan and shared across vehicles around the world. Third, capital
costs for testing equipment and the capability of building large,
complex production technology—like robotic welding systems
for the car body or today’s automated paint systems—are high,
and the technology requires a great deal of the specific expertise
that is mainly located in Japan.
Thus, it makes sense for these activities to be centralized.
In practice, this centralization meant that no region—not even
North America, which was by far Toyota’s largest—could make
final decisions about recalls. Those decisions were made cen-
trally in Japan, based on information received from the various
regions.
Takeshi Uchiyamada explained that there was yet another
good reason that Toyota had decided to keep the engineers deal-
ing with recalls separate from customer-facing parts of the orga-
nization: so that recall decisions could be made by people who
did not have to worry about the cost of the recall or potential
damage to the brand. The process was set up to make sure that
the quality department could put safety and quality ahead of
business concerns and was not unduly influenced by the sales or
regional units, which were concerned about revenue and prof-
itability. But this intentional separation to create checks and
balances created a different problem. In trying to protect qual-
ity and safety decision making from sales concerns, the com-
pany inadvertently choked off a lot of customer feedback to the
quality department. Without that customer feedback, the quality
department was left to make recall decisions based solely on the

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