The Simpsons Slams American Cars, Robots, or Roger Smith?

I’ve always been a huge Simpsons fan, even if the show has gotten
less funny in the past few years (flame away on that topic, if you
must). The beginning of the this week’s episode made me chuckle a
bit.

For those who can’t see the video (those darned oppressive masters
of the corporate firewall!), it’s an intro to a histrionic news
piece - with Kent Brockman - about a coming total eclipse being the
end of the world. In the clip I extracted here from Hulu.com, the
fall of industry is illustrated by a group of robots building a car
on an assembly line. At the end of the line, a robot stamps “Made
in America” on the hood and the car promptly falls apart. So, it’s
not really a slam on all American cars (or shouldn’t be). Well, the
Simpsons producers and writers probably meant it as such. It should
really be a slam against companies who had “visions” of a
“lights out factory” where robots dominated and people were an
expense that wasn’t needed or wanted. Compare that to Toyota, a
company that wasn’t as automated as, say, General Motors, and
invested more in people and their shop floor “kaizen” and problem
solving skills… As this excellent
article points out:

By the late 1980s, GM’s chairman, Roger Smith, had
figured out that his company had something to learn from the
Japanese. He just didn’t know what it was. He poured billions into
new, heavily automated U.S.
factories—including an effort to build an experimental
“lights out” factory that had almost no hourly workers. He
entered a joint venture with Toyota to reopen an old GM factory in
California, called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI.
The idea was that GM managers could go to NUMMI to see up close
what the “secret” of Toyota’s assembly system was. Smith also
launched what he promoted as an entirely new car company, Saturn,
which was meant to pioneer both a more cooperative relationship
with UAW workers and a new way of selling cars.

None of these was a bad idea. But GM took too long
to learn the lessons from these experiments—good or bad.
The automation strategy fell on
its face because the robots didn’t work properly, and the
cars they built struck many consumers as blandly styled and of poor
quality. NUMMI did give GM managers valuable information about
Toyota’s manufacturing and management system, which a team of MIT
researchers would later call “lean production.” But too many of the
GM managers who gained knowledge from NUMMI were unable to make an
impact on GM’s core North American business.

Anyway, I’ve probably over-analyzed a short video that gave me a
sad chuckle.