I have great admiration for Toyota. I suspect there are two related reasons: The first is marginal improvements. Here's a quote from the New Yorker article.

I have great admiration for Toyota. I suspect there are two related reasons: The first is marginal improvements. Here's a quote from the New Yorker article. Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small—making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say—and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before. This sounds like to me, an example of Linus's Law: many eyes make all bugs shallow. To put it prosaically, the fuck-up rate will be lower because the gap between expectations and reality is closer. The second part is with respect to automation. I suspect one of Toyota's secrets is to deliberately introduce redundant workers into processes that are normally fully automated. This comes out of an observation from the father of economics; that men and women observing a system intimately will gradually conceive of ideas to improve it. A robot or AI cannot do this. They could probably do it if an AGI solved the frame problem but to date that is science fiction. The net affect of this is that Toyota is smarter than GM on reliability. Of course in a world with rapidly rising salaries Toyota's reliability may lose out over flashier innovations. For now though, it is the King.