Toyota give time to Development Dept to over come Quality Woes.

Toyota Motor Corp. will give its product development engineers an additional month to complete vehicles to address potential quality problems in an effort to prevent more image-damaging recalls.

"The fast growth of the past decade has been too much in some areas for the company to keep up with," Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada told reporters at Toyota headquarters today.

He added that Toyota's future growth will be determined by its engineering capacity.

Uchiyamada, who is in charge of research and development, said Toyota has allocated 1,000 engineers to deal with quality issues, up 50 percent.

Of that group, a new team of 100 “Devil's advocate” engineers will work independently to audit vehicle quality from the perspective of drivers, Uchiyamada said.

"It's important for our engineers to look at a vehicle and see how customers might use it in ways that haven't been reflected in our testing," he said, adding that doing so could help identify problems like the issue of stacked or loose floorbefore they hit the market.

"We want them to be a little mean,” he said.

Src & Text: [autonews]