Sheldon: What Makes The Four-Cylinder Tacoma Engine So Reliable

Except car manufacturers are subject to thousands of pages of laws and regulations. It is not legal to make an inexpensive truck anymore, even if there is market demand for it.

 

Multiple truck sites, looking for those clicks (!) present the Toyota Stout as a less expensive alternative to the Tacoma, competing with the likes of Ford Maverick on price (for which that original hybrid FWD at a great price was quite the deal -- until Ford found demand outstripping supply -- a weird and wonderful place for any manufacturer to be in -- if you can ramp up production moderately quickly). Is the Stout a thing for the NA market? Stout Hybrid?

 

Consumers set the prices, and sellers don't price things according to what it costs them, they set it based on what the market will pay (otherwise all goods would have the same minimal profit margin).

You can bet that if people stopped buying $50k Rav4's (or whatever), then Toyota would sell a cheaper one.

Toyota is actually the industry leader in operational excellence, meaning their production costs should be among the lowest in the industry. They are definitely not pricing vehicles based on their cost to produce.

 

At some point the non commercial use of 1/2 ton trucks will be eliminated once emissions requirements clamp down hard. It will happen as it has everywhere else in the country. By then we’ll be able to buy the $10k Toyota pickup truck we all desire

 

The point I'm trying to make here is that Toyota moving to more complex and costly motors is not a market driven phenomenon, it is regulatory.

 

When you have 6 cylinders instead of just 4, odds of braking goes up because there are more of them.

 

Why does Sheldon even need to assure us that Gen4 will actually be reliable? It’s a Toyota, so shouldn’t we just assume it will never break.

And if according to some, the Gen3 isn’t worthy after 8 years of Toyota’s continuous improvement, why would I feel better driving an all-new design with a turbocharger made in the same factories by the same workers who just botched Gen3 axles? Did they get pay raises in Baja? Just curious, before I lay down 50 large on a new one.

 

Sheldon needs to assure buyers because, as you can see in this forum, people freak out about anything new. Every change is a travesty and an affront to Toyota’s history. It’s the end of the Tacoma, the end of reliability, and the end of my masculine sense of self

 

The engines are built in the same factory as the axles so it sounds like there’s nothing to worry about.