Are Japanese car building techniques the best?
Are Japanese car building techniques the best? It’s a well-known fact around the world that Americans love their cars. And for many decades, Americans overwhelmingly turned to the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — to satisfy their automotive lust. Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and automation. These advancements called for producing large numbers of one type of vehicle (even in the same color), keeping the workers as busy as possible and running the plant around the clock. While more was more, it wasn’t necessarily better. Very little changed in the car-building process used by American automakers, and until the 1970s, there wasn’t much in the way of mass-market foreign competition. Japan got into the car business almost immediately after World War II. Early attempts by the Japanese resulted in the production of somewhat primitive knockoffs of American designs
