For nearly fifteen years, until about fifteen years ago, I was a frequent business traveler. I spent a lot of time in airports, rental cars, and hotels. Back then, before the Internet and laptops with wifi, newspapers and magazines were essential for a long flight.
The rental cars were often the most interesting part of the trips, because they were almost always American, and they turned me into a student of automotive awfulness. The rare times I was given a Toyota, the contrast was striking. Everything from the seating position to the placement of controls, and the feeling of quality, to the lack of “funny noises,” was vastly superior to anything I rented with a GM or Ford nameplate.
The low point for me was when a brand-new Pontiac Grand Am stalled and left me stranded on my way to an airport. Cell phones for consumers were almost non-existent, and I was stuck having to leave the car in the middle of the road so I could find a payphone to call the rental agency. I started declaring that “GM is doomed,” and I made a point of seeing ‘Roger & Me’, by Michael Moore. Then I read a book I’d seen reviewed in Business Week, called ‘Rivethead’, by Ben Hamper, with a forward by Moore. It was an honest, and unflattering, portrait of the working stiff side of GM.
I was reminded of ‘Rivethead’ a few weeks ago, when ‘This American Life’ devoted a show to the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant, aka NUMMI (KNEW-me), a joint venture between GM and Toyota. With GM having to be rescued from the brink of oblivion, and Toyota now having quality problems of its own, this program answers the questions, “what made the Japanese so good (with some exceptions), and why is American quality so variable from one plant to another?”
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi