i can understand that...thing is...its just an opinion...everyone is entitled to their own thing...

 

I agree with GSR.

I owned two 89 Civics in a row, s/ns so close they certainly came off the line the same week. Built in NA (Canada).

First one I drove 156000 miles, and I only sold it because the second one became available for a really good price and it had only 60k on it. Drove that one to 257000 miles. Only sold it because my dad died and left me enough money to buy a new car.

They were the best cars I've ever owned, and they weren't built in Japan.

Today, AFAIK factories are much more about automation and manufacturing process control than they were in the bad old days when the US got its horrible quality reputation. It's harder to screw things up than it used to be.

Based on the polls here, most of you folks are way, way too young to remember how crappy cars were a few decades ago. In the 60s if you had a car that went 80k it was a big deal, and 100k was almost unheard of. Now 100k is nothing, and I routinely expect to get at least 200k out of a car, no matter where it's made. My current car is a Focus wagon, built in Michigan. 155k and doing just fine. When it finally wears out I'm going to buy a Fit...not because the car sucks, but because I want better economy than the Focus gives me.

(PS: Good book about US auto factories in the 70s: Rivethead)

 

Standards are what they are ... minimum benchmarks.

You cannot instill pride everywhere and into everyone, so you develop standards to compensate.

 

You have a opinion and so do we....

 

facts are....more hondas are built here, tahn fords and GM vehicles

 

I agree with you to the extent that the Japan-branded cars built in North America tend to be just as well-made as those that come from Japan (exceptions do exist, however).

But I do not agree that 5S, Lean, Six Sigma, or for that matter, ISO (which has little, if any, to do with quality assurance anyway), necessarily lead to quality. I have spent a long time in manufacturing in Japan and the U.S., and even worked for a Japanese automobile manufacturer (whose name I decline to disclose). I have worked in places where these process models had supposedly been put in place. Yet the actual quality output nevertheless varied among these companies. I once worked for a company that was using Six Sigma and had ISO all over the banner. Their quality control stank. I also worked for another place that had none of that, and yet their QA was fantastic, and the company was a leader in its field (in the end, they had to get into these process models just so that they could say they were doing them in order to sell - it was a PR move).

Are all Japanese auto companies the same in terms of quality? I know they are not, from my own experience, even if the same process systems are on the book everywhere. What makes a difference in the end is not these processes - it's how a particular company implements and use them (among other critical factors).