Toyota Makes Promises of Quality with New Yaris

By now, anybody could have figured out that no car, no matter how expensive can ever be considered perfect by any means. But standards have steadily improved over the years, and one Japanese automaker knows just how dangerous it can be if it doesn’t address the issue properly. We are of course talking about Toyota here, and their brand-new Yaris.

The company has released a video that highlights it has gone to great lengths to ensure it delivers a quality product. “Work to guarantee the built-in quality of new Yaris began years before the car reached the production line. Toyota has gone to unprecedented lengths to ensure the car meets more exacting quality standards than any of its predecessors, a strategy that has called for commitment from its own teams and the close co-operation of all its suppliers,” the carmaker says.

The engineers from Toyota’s plant in Valenciennes, France, where the Yaris has been put together for the past 10 year, made the trip to Japan, where they spent up to 18 months trying to identify potential pitfalls. This work began three years before the start of production, 18 months earlier than for any previous Yaris.

The Yaris benefits from improvements in the key quality areas. First, there’s intensive simultaneous engineering and supplier parts preparation. Basically, quality relies just as much on what parts suppliers can deliver as it does on Toyota’s capabilities. Secondly, there’s the supplier development program, which is reserved to the most important companies involved in production.

Together with its partners, Toyota went over 700 parts, which resulted in 900 specific quality improvements.

It’s all talk of logistics, parts and marketing, so we’ll have to wait and see whether the Yaris is really all that good.