"One car has been passed down to three generations, and people are still there", and many people's belief in Japanese automobiles is still unwavering to this day. However, even Japan itself does not believe in the myth of "Made in Japan".
Recently, Toyota Motor has once again exposed a counterfeiting scandal, and directly stripped off the gorgeous coat of "Made in Japan". On December 20, Daihatsu Motor, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota, held a press conference to admit that it had cheated and falsified data in the side impact test of new cars in order to obtain national safety certification, and suspended all model shipments.
On the one hand, the scandal has a wide range of effects, in addition to the side impact test, Daihatsu also has at least 174 data falsifications in 25 test items, involving a total of 64 models, including not only almost all models of the Daihatsu brand, but also some models of Japanese brands such as Toyota, Mazda and SubaruOn the other hand, data fraud has a very long time span, dating back to 1989 and has a history of more than 30 years.
Of course, what excites the Japanese the most is that Daihatsu cars are so-called "truly made in Japan". Daihatsu Motor's global sales from January to October 2023 reached 1.1 million units, nearly half of which were "self-produced and sold" in Japan, especially light vehicles are very popular in Japan, accounting for 30% of the market share of the Japanese light vehicle market. However, Daihatsu Automobile's full-model, long-term data fraud has directly shattered the myth of many Japanese people that "first-class products are used for themselves, and second-rate products are exported abroad".
In fact, Daihatsu's counterfeiting is not an accident or an isolated case, but it is just the tip of the iceberg of the shady Japanese automobile industry. In recent years, various scandals have erupted in the Japanese automobile industry and the entire Japanese manufacturing industry, so that the "craftsman spirit" is being repeatedly staged in the form of "craftsmanship spirit".
However, no matter how much you bow and reflect, the fraud seems to be getting worse and worse, and there is no sign of improvement at all. In fact, in the author's opinion, the Japanese manufacturing industry itself is suffering from a "serious illness" and is caught in a dilemma, and data falsification is just the result of the contradiction. As long as the fundamental contradiction is not resolved, the counterfeiting will continue until the entire "Made in Japan" myth is completely shattered.
From "craftsman spirit" to "craftsman spirit".
Fraud in Japan's automotive industry is not an occasional mistake, but the entire industry is festering, from automakers to parts manufacturers, there are frequent scandals such as data fraud, cutting corners, and shoddy products.
For example, Japanese cars have been known for their "environmental protection and low fuel consumption" since the beginning of the oil crisis, and in principle, Japanese cars can make gasoline burn more fully by improving combustion efficiency, which can not only reduce polluting vehicle emissions, but also reduce fuel consumption.
However, in the 1990s and early 21st century, Japanese cars began to falsify a large number of fuel economy and fuel consumption tests. In 2016, Tetsuro Aikawa, president of Japan's Mitsubishi Motors, admitted that Mitsubishi had indeed used improper means in fuel consumption tests to make the fuel consumption test results of its models better than the actual situation, and that the fraud had continued for 25 years.
Once Pandora's box is opened, it is out of control, and doubts about the fuel economy and fuel consumption of Japanese cars are also spreading. In the following years, most Japanese car brands such as Subaru, Nissan, Suzuki, Mazda, and Yamaha were exposed to long-term data tampering and falsification in fuel economy, exhaust emissions, fuel consumption tests, etc., with the longest being 30 years.
In the past, Japanese automobiles did achieve a counterattack against European and American car companies through low fuel consumption. However, with the rapid development of car companies in China and South Korea and other countries, fuel consumption and energy saving are no longer the patent of Japanese cars, and Japanese companies do not hesitate to cut corners and falsify data in order to be more competitive in data, and mainstream car companies are generally involved in fraud, which has lasted for decades.
Of course, fraud in the Japanese automotive industry is not only a problem of fuel consumption, but also a serious fraud in safety.
For example, the 2015 Takata airbag incident. Takata Group used to be the world's second largest airbag manufacturer, accounting for 20% of the market. However, in order to reduce costs, the Takata Group used ammonium nitrate compounds, which are prone to aging, as propellants, and the reaction of the airbag when it was triggered to pop open was more violent after a long time, and as a result, the airbag that could have reduced the accident fatality rate by 11% became a "fatal airbag" instead. According to statistics, from 2009 to 2015, there were at least 23 passenger fatalities and more than 100 injuries caused by Takata airbag failures worldwide. The incident affected almost all Japanese car brands, with Honda alone recalling 5.1 million vehicles worldwide.
Following the "Takata airbag" incident, in 2017, Japan's Kobe Steel was exposed to data fraud. Kobe Steel is the third largest steel company in Japan, and its steel products are widely used in the body, hood, and tailgate of major Japanese automakers. In 2017, Kobe Steel held a press conference, admitting that the company's three factories and one subsidiary had tampered with important factory data such as the strength, size and durability of some aluminum alloy and copper products for a long time, and passed off substandard products as substandard products**, and falsified data for more than 10 years.
By 2020, there will be a blowout of data fraud in the Japanese automotive industry. Among them, Japan's Joyson Company carried out "data tampering" on some seat belts that did not meet the standards in the strength test, and more than 9 million seat belts that did not meet the standards were sent to the marketIn addition, Japan's Toray Company admitted that in the past eight years, it has tampered with the quality inspection data of automobile tire strength and substandard tiresIn addition, the fuel pump produced by the Japanese parts giant Denso was found to be faulty, which may cause safety risks such as engine stalling, resulting in Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Honda, Subaru and many other Japanese car companies have set off a wave of large-scale recalls around the world, involving as many as 4.79 million vehicles, and the problem has not been completely solved so far.
By 2021, Japan's Dawning was exposed to the falsification of quality inspection data for brakes and parts products, with more than 114,000 quality inspection data tampered with or fabricated, and the fraud began in 2001, with a time span of 20 years. Since 2022, Toyota's Hino Motors and Toyota Industries have also been exposed to data fraud in product testing. Dafabet's admission to cheating in crash tests, mentioned at the beginning of the article, is the latest example.
Of course, there are a large number of other data fraud, cutting corners, shoddy incidents in Japanese car companies, almost every Japanese car label is full of a large number of data fraud and water injection, and each solution, in the end, the leader basically stood up and bowed and apologized, and the "craftsman spirit" has also begun to become the "craftsman spirit" in the mouth of netizens, and Japanese cars have also changed from the previous closed-eye purchase to now more and more people stay away.
The "craftsman spirit" that was "evacuated".
It has been said that every Japanese person seems innocent, but together they can do cruel and ridiculous things. This is exactly what the Japanese automotive industry is all about. Everyone and every company is emphasizing the spirit of craftsmanship, but what is presented in general is such a large-scale, pervasive, and decades-long data fraud and cutting corners.
In fact, a very important reason is that the craftsmanship of Japanese manufacturing has been drained since the 1990s. The spirit of craftsmanship is often interpreted as "the spirit of excellence", in fact, this spirit is just a product of the handicraft era, more from the process of 0 to 1, in the current handicrafts, art, science and technology and other fields There is still a certain production space, but it is actually incompatible with the process of large-scale production of modern industry from 1 to n.
It is undeniable that craftsmanship has played an important role in the rise of Japan's manufacturing industry. The most typical example is that before the 1990s, Japan once led the world in the electrical and electronic industry.
After World War II, Japan's electronics industry began to rise by relying on OEM for the United States, but soon Japan began to get rid of the status of foundry and break through with the "craftsmanship spirit of excellence", trying to catch up with the United States.
By the early 80s, the Japanese electronics industry had begun to overtake the United States in an all-round way, and even created a Japanese version"The whole industry chain is independent"。For example, in terms of upstream materials and equipment, there are photoresists from Tokyo Oika and JSR, as well as lithography machines from NikonThe midstream DRAM Japan has more than half of the global market share, and all of them have achieved independent research and development, manufacturing, packaging and testing with the support of Japan**. In the downstream end products, Sharp's panels, Sony's TVs, and Fujifilm's films almost monopolize most of the consumer electronics market.
However, Japan's rise in the electronics industry has touched a nerve in the United States. For the United States, the military, the dollar, and high technology are the three pillars of hegemony, and "the side of the couch cannot allow others to snore," even if it is an ally of the United States. The German thinker Liszt has a wonderful metaphor called "drawing a ladder" in "The National Economic System of Political Economy", which talks about "when a person climbs to the top, he will kick the ladder behind him to prevent others from following him". In the late 80s, the United States began to draw the Japanese ladder, and the ** sanctions against Japan's chip and electronics industries reached their peak.
In June 1985, the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) filed a lawsuit against the dumping of Japanese electronics, demanding sanctions against the Japanese semiconductor industry. Finally, in September 1986, the United States and Japan signed the "Semiconductor Agreement", and the "Plaza Accord" forced the yen to appreciate, which caused the Japanese semiconductor industry, which originally accounted for 80% of the global semiconductor market, to begin to collapse completely. In June 1991, the United States and Japan signed a five-year "New Semiconductor Agreement" to further restrict Japan's semiconductor industry, and by 1992, American companies had regained the global market for the semiconductor industry.
The semiconductor war is just a microcosm of US sanctions, and all high-tech industries such as chips and integrated circuits have either been absorbed by the United States or defeated by the United States, and Japan's advantages in the high-tech field have all returned to the control of the United States.
Craftsmanship corresponds to high returns to some extent, and now these areas are basically stuck in the United States. It can be said that at this point in time, the spirit of Japanese craftsmanship has survived in name only, and only handicrafts and arts, such as the god of sushi and Hayao Miyazaki, remain.
When the high-tech field was stuck by the United States, more resources in Japan could only be invested in conventional industries for involution, in fact, the Japanese automobile industry began to become a new pillar industry of the Japanese economy after the decline of the electronics industry.
To make matters worse, the ecological niche of the foundry Japan will not be able to survive. Around 2000, South Korea's Hyundai Motor and China's top five independent car companies (Geely, Changan, Great Wall, Chery, BYD) and other car companies made rapid progress in technology and quality, but the cost was much lower than that of Japanese car companies, and the economic and practical advantages of Japanese cars began to be challenged by China and South Korea.
Therefore, if we go back to the 1990s, we will find that Japan is actually facing competition from China and the United States at the same time, which corresponds to the fact that Japan promotes the "craftsman spirit" and emphasizes quality on the one handOn the other hand, it continues to compress the cost of survival and maintain the cost-effective advantage. As a result, Japan has become accustomed to eating the "old roots" made in Japan over the past few decades, and has begun to engage in widespread data falsification, cutting corners, and shoddy products in order to maintain Japan's competitive advantage.
Write at the end
Obama, the former U.S. president, once asked Steve Jobs, "How can we get the mobile phone manufacturing industry back to the United States?"Jobs replied dryly, "Sir, those jobs will never come back." ”
In fact, what Steve Jobs said was just very common sense in economics: capital and talent will flow to the place with the highest returns. In the U.S., Silicon Valley and high-tech are places with higher returns, with an unbeatable advantage in the 0-to-1 innovation processIn contrast, China's manufacturing industry chain is complete, coupled with the effect of ultra-large-scale production, with a huge mass production capacity from 1 to n quickly, and the investment income of the manufacturing industry is more considerable. Corresponding to new energy vehicles, the more representative ones are Tesla and BYD.
But even if China and the United States have such an advantage, it will be very difficult for the United States to make up for the industrial chain, or for China to break through. Not to mention Japan, which is in the middle.
In the past two or three decades, the relationship between China and the United States has been relatively stable, coupled with the deep accumulation of Japanese enterprises, Japan can still have a good production space. With the escalation of competition between China and the United States, China's science and technology has broken through, and the United States has begun to lay out its own industrial chain, in fact, it is squeezing Japan's living space from two directions.
The root cause of the problem of counterfeiting in the Japanese automobile industry has been planted for 30 years, but it has begun to explode intensively under the accelerated squeeze of China and the United States. To be sure, in addition to Daihatsu's data fraud, there are still a lot of fraud problems in the Japanese auto industry, but they themselves are still deceiving themselves in the myths of the past.
As Benedict says in "The Chrysanthemum and the Knife": They are very mindful of what others think of their actions, but they are content when others are unaware of their misdeeds.