A Tale of Two Car Disassemblies
What Has Ford Learned About How to Improve?
THE AIM for today’s newsletter is to share with you a story about two occasions Ford disassembled a competitor’s vehicle to learn what they were doing differently, and the lessons they took from each. In particular, I’ll be comparing a recent article in Forbes about CEO Jim Farley’s discovery about how Tesla and Chinese EVs are built, and the tale of Frank Pipp, a manufacturing manager, who 65 years earlier made discoveries about how Toyotas were made, as retold in the book Prophets in the Dark: How Xerox Reinvented Itself and Beat Back the Japanese.
The Frank Pipp story was one of the first my friend and mentor Dr. Bill Bellows recounted for me years ago, and I’ve wanted to write about here — Farley just gave me the perfect opportunity to do so, especially in light of their recent announcement Ford may be scrapping their F-150 Lightning EV pickup.
Let’s dive in.
Taking Things Apart
Dr. Russell Ackoff famously observed that you cannot understand why a system works the way it does by pulling it apart into separate components and analyzing each independent of the other because it is not the sum of those parts together but the product of their interactions that explains this. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot about how a product was made and the standards of quality used to achieve it through abductive reasoning, or the inferring of explanations from what we observe in the parts and how well they fit together and work together in service of the whole. Much can be learned about quality through the precise marrying of parts because it is a direct reflection of the mindset that made them, from the very top of management on down.
So it is with cars, and automakers have been pulling apart each other’s products for generations to learn what they’re doing differently, and in turn what they could respectively be doing better. There are even independent consultants like Sandy Munro who compile manuals of disassemblies down to the individual nuts and bolts to help clients understand the quality of manufacturing behind various makes and models. He even publishes videos of some dissassemblies on YouTube.
And this is what Ford has been doing for some time — although not always for the benefit of improving quality.
What Ford Learned About Japanese Quality in the 1960s
Our first story is about a manufacturing manager at a Ford assembly plant in California in the late 1960s, Frank Pipp, who was curious about the surge of inexpensive Japanese imports on the highways and why people were buying them. This piqued his curiosity enough to understand how they were made and what challenge they posed to Ford. What he discovered alarmed him enough that he invited some of the brass from Dearborn, MI to see for themselves. Here’s what happened next (annotations mine):
When they got there, he had a Toyota truck up on a hoist. Pipp’s plant had bought the truck and disassembled it to get a feel for how well made it was. At that time, Ford, along with the other American automakers, didn’t believe that you could assemble a car without a rubber mallet handy to bang together the parts that didn’t quite fit right. The rest of the parts—the ones that came out engineered and manufactured properly—fit together easily. They were known as snap-fit parts. When Pipp’s crew got done taking apart and reassembling the Toyota truck, they were speechless. They hadn’t once needed to pick up a mallet. The truck was entirely snap-fit. They had never seen anything like it. To make sure they weren’t hallucinating, they took it apart a second time and put it back together. Incredibly enough, it was a snap-fit vehicle. The Toyota parts were made to far more exacting dimensions than Ford was making them.
- Kearns, David, and David Nadler. Prophets in the Dark: How Xerox Reinvented Itself and Beat Back the Japanese. HarperBusiness, 1992. p. 82.
Astute readers of Deming already surmise that this was the infancy of the Japanese Miracle that he inspired almost two decades earlier, along with others like Dr. Joseph Juran. Pipp’s demonstration proved that the Americans were already on the back foot and would need to make similar changes to even hope of catching up. So what did the leadership do in the face of this evidence?
The Dearborn people were told of this discovery and invited to look over the truck itself as it drooped from the hoist. Everyone was very quiet, until the division general manager cleared his throat and remarked, ‘The customer will never notice.” And then everyone excitedly nodded assent and exclaimed, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” and they all trotted off happy as clams.
- Ibid. p. 82.
The decision made that day to continue to ignore the threat of Toyota’s cost-efficient quality would eventually lead to the panic of the 1980s brought about by the NBC Whitepaper documentary, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?, and the top-brass of Ford and GM desperately calling Dr. Deming to help them catch up.
