roboRoboat

Woah, rad! Mantises (manti? mantopedes? 🤔) are the coolest.

God I wish I’d never heard of Rush Limbaugh. Grew up with his trash 🤢

Thanks for the insight! I've learned a little more about Toyota's process specifically in this thread, which is cool.

I would argue that "over engineer" in my original context is more in the sense that aircraft are "over engineered" to be reliable beyond normal operating parameters. American cars at the time were generally built with like 100k miles in mind before needing a rebuild. Then Toyota comes rolling in with engines that can do 3-4 times that no prob. So Toyotas are "over engineered" in the sense that "these engines go above and beyond what other manufacturers consider acceptable."

But I agree that there's maybe some better terminology to be used because when I think of "over engineered" in context of cars, I am mostly thinking of things like, "Okay, I get that maybe you eek out a teeny bit more efficiency, but putting the water pump under the manifold where it can leak into the block seems like a really bad idea." I've updated my comment to reflect that, open to suggestions haha.

brap brap

The FD is honestly such a timeless design. Even my non-gearhead wife thinks they're beautiful.

Turbo AWD Previa is on my top 10 list for sure. So cool.

Has a lot more of the Ferrari 308 / SW20 MR2 look to it. The flying buttress look is pretty cool.

Same. I bought an electric impact and used it for working on cars for something like three years. I think that was like six or seven years ago and it's still going strong.

Yeah, you're probably right. I would still argue that generalized culture perceptions play a role, but early Japanese cars and other products certainly earned their good reputations.

May I ask what you ended up choosing and what some of the runner-ups were?

I don't know why you got downvoted so hard, lol. I think this is definitely a factor, whether it's fair or not. Maybe not the primary one, but an important one nonetheless. American perceptions of foreign cultures certainly bleed into how we perceive the products they manufacture.

It might be a "chicken and the egg" sort of thing, but classic stereotypes match up pretty well imo. Americans think the Japanese are fastidious and hyper focused on reputation; Germans innovate but over-engineer things to to a fault; Italians are passionate but put aesthetics and performance first, and the French just don't want to work. Those stereotypes are still rampant in all our media and absolutely influence how we perceive the products they sell us, true or not.

It's definitely true in the States. Due in part to import costs, we don't get many of the bare bones reliable models from pretty much anyone but Volkswagen. Other European brands either don't manufacture in the States, or only manufacture a small range here. For example, Mercedes-Benz and BMW pretty much only manufacture SUVs here because we can't get over huge ass cars, so it makes more sense to make those here since we buy so many. But our economy class market is too competitive for the good cheap Euro stuff. Additionally, Americans automatically assign European brands a level of prestige, which they want to maintain, so we get the fancy over-engineered stuff that costs a lot to maintain and fix.