My Toyota was the only car I ever bought that had exactly zero defects and worked perfectly in every capacity asked of it.<p>They are the Debian Linux of vehicles — older libraries but stable. No cutting edge package managers to crash your workday.<p>Therefore, for them to shut the line down means they are working through a serious issue, but as long as they keep that commitment to “quality, reliability and durability” and the reputation they’ve earned because of it, I’m sure the reason is worth it.<p>That said, the new Land Cruiser has cup holders for a third row seat in the US (a 250 globally, not sure why they decided to do a Lc brand on a 250 just for the US markets), but it… doesn’t have a third row to use them. It’s baffling and very not Toyota. So maybe they are slipping?
One could only speculate on the cause here without more info. I am reminded of reading The Toyota Way a while back, which does talk about how they would shut down lines for any defect. A coworker of mine was pretty adamant that this was A Good Idea(TM), but I thought about how much of IT best practices are about uptime and doing (often principled!) workarounds when you have operational issues, and moving forward in a degraded state.<p>I wonder if there are IT operations that do try to aim for the ~no defect approach like this.
Always headlines when this happens, but shutting down production like this is what Toyota believes is part of their magic sauce. They lose productivity when a problem shuts them down, but most of the time when things are working they gain due to lack of waste. But despite being a common part of curriculum around the world, it isn't that common to see, I think because intuitively it seems wrong somehow.
Toyota has major supply chain problems. I wanted to buy a Corolla recently, but the wait time was 8+ months, so I ended up buying a Honda Civic instead, which also had a wait time, but it was much more tolerable at 1 month.
Version of news at the Japan Times: (no account/paywall)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37303807">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37303807</a>
Oh how I do hate the word "glitch". It tells you nothing and makes the whole thing sound like a happy little accident. A glitch to me is "Hey every time we order 200 of these fuses, we also get five lug nuts". That's a glitch. It's weird, but production moves forward. This is an incident.<p>No, it either a software bug, misconfiguration, network issue, hardware failure in Toyotas part ordering system or something to that nature.