(TEMA: Erlanger, KY) -- Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America Inc. (TEMA) has broadened the scope of its successful on-site SMART evaluation process. This decision follows an 80 percent drop in customer concerns about acceleration that have been reported to the company, compared to six months ago. The company also announced additional quality leadership initiatives and milestones, including:
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• Equipping all its new vehicles with advanced safety features, including smart stop technology and enhanced event data recorders (EDR)
• Instituting new training protocols to further strengthen the quality, safety, and reliability of its vehicles and enhance its responsiveness to customer needs
• Enhancing supplier collaboration and quality controls
• Completing more than five million remedies on vehicles involved in three key recalls, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Toyota and Lexus dealers, and the exceptional response from customers
These measures and accomplishments were unveiled by Steve St. Angelo, Toyota’s chief quality officer for North America, at a news briefing with former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater, chairman of Toyota’s independent North American Quality Advisory Panel. The panel is working closely with the company to help ensure that its quality and safety assurance programs are in keeping with best industry practice.
“Toyota has made significant progress in recent months to help ensure that our customers can have complete confidence in the quality, safety, and reliability of their vehicles, and our latest initiatives build on those accomplishments,” says St. Angelo. “Toyota’s continuous efforts to strengthen vehicle quality and safety, and to respond swiftly and thoroughly to our customers’ concerns, are driven by our core values and will always be a fundamental part of our company. Our goal is to set new, even higher standards for quality assurance and customer responsiveness in both the factory and the market by continuing to put our customers first in everything that we do.”
The new initiatives and progress updates announced by St. Angelo include:
Expansion of SMART process. Toyota is broadening the scope of the Swift Market Analysis Response Teams (SMART) process to include investigation of other customer concerns as they arise. This is intended to further strengthen the company’s filed information-gathering and -evaluation capabilities as well as its ability to respond quickly to customers’ needs.
Originally launched in April 2010 to enhance the company’s ability to quickly investigate customer acceleration concerns in Toyota and Lexus vehicles, the SMART process is conducted by more than 200 engineers and field technicians who seek to contact customers within 24 hours of a report and as necessary, arrange for a comprehensive, on-site vehicle evaluation.
Production of vehicles with smart stop technology and enhanced event data recorders. This year, all new Toyota vehicles for sale in North America are being equipped with smart stop technology, a brake override system that provides customers with an additional level of confidence by automatically reducing engine power when a vehicle’s brake and accelerator pedals are applied simultaneously under certain driving conditions.
In addition, all 2011 model year Toyota, Lexus, and Scion vehicles now in production are being equipped with enhanced event data recorders (EDR) that provide both pre- and post-collision data. EDRs are designed to provide data to help understand how a vehicle’s various systems functioned during a collision and can play an important role in post-collision reconstruction when corroborated by physical evidence and other forensic research.
Enhancing supplier collaboration and quality controls. Toyota is collaborating with its suppliers to review manufacturing processes, quality assurance policies, and testing procedures for key parts, with the goal of helping them and the company strengthen existing systems and implement best practices across the supply chain.
To benefit from the knowledge and experience of its suppliers, Toyota is revising its Supplier Quality Assurance Manual to capture supplier best practices, benchmarks of global competitors, and other feedback from Toyota’s supplier review. Toyota’s North American Center for Quality Excellence will also expand its curriculum to include training for suppliers in Toyota quality and design activities, best practice sharing, and new quality assurance requirements.
Exceptional customer and dealer response to recall campaigns. To date, Toyota and Lexus dealers have performed more than five million remedies for the three key recalls the company announced during late 2009 and early 2010, including approximately 1.8 million to address sticking accelerator pedals, 3.1 million to address the potential for unsecured or incompatible floor mat to trap an accelerator pedal, and 128,000 program updates to the anti-lock brake systems (ABS) in certain 2010 Prius and Lexus models.
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