Agree Ford introduced many of the new manufacturing techniques which allowed leaner and more profitable manufacturing. The 1986 Taurus was the first US car to be designed like a Honda, i.e. the design team included manufacturing, assembly, service, etc. personnel. As a result the assembly hours dropped to 21 hours per car (significantly less than the US competitors) or so at the Atlanta plant.
All this did not translate into benefits for the user. The car had a number of problems and Honda quality was not part of the design package unfortunately. But it made a bag of money for Ford.
To be succesful in the long term you need all the new desing and manufacturing techniques, as well as very high design quality so that your customers will come back without a lot of advertising and price cutting. Toyota had this perfected until the recent recalls started.
Good point, Mountainbike. Japanese visitors to North America are dumbfounded at the huge new car lots here. In Japan, real estate is so expemnsive that this fact alone would make it unprofitable to have large inventories. Typical Japanese car dealers have several demonstrator models, and cars in the showromm and that’s about it. The customer decides what he wants after driving the demo and looking at the new model on the floor, and then places an order.
Toyota City builds these to order and 14 days (max) later the customer gets his car. This is essentially applying lean concepts to inventory management, greatly reducing the cost of doing business.
Having spent some time in Europe and Asia, large new car lots are tyical of North America where dealers used to be forced to take all these vehcles, even if they did not own them (the manufacturer kept posession) through “floor planning” financing.