Toyota Technical Center in York Township conducting more testing as Japanese automaker reacts to quality problems

Posted: Jul 6, 2010 at 10:58 AM [Jul 6, 2010]

Engineers at the Ann Arbor area's Toyota Technical Center are putting a greater emphasis on product testing as the Japanese automaker seeks to avoid the quality problems that led to massive recalls earlier this year.

"Before we were squeezing the development time into a very, very short time," Bruce Brownlee, Toyota Technical Center's senior executive administrator for external affairs, said in an interview this morning. "Now we’re still having a very quick development time, but we’re trying to a little bit more look at all the different evaluation and quality checks that we have always done but will do with even more thoroughness."

Toyota's decision to conduct more testing of its models and reduce the number of outside engineers it relies on was first detailed today in the Wall Street Journal.

The automaker faces intense scrutiny from political leaders, federal regulators and consumers in the wake of 8.5 million vehicle recalls tied to several problems, including faulty accelerators.

The York Township-based Toyota Technical Center, which also oversees other North American engineering operations for the automaker, is responsible for several projects, including continual work on the Avalon model. Local engineers also contributed significant work to the redesigned Sienna minivan and the Venza crossover.

The Technical Center - which employs nearly 1,100 people, some of them outside of Michigan - was not responsible for the accelerator problems, officials have said.

But local engineers are reassessing their processes to help the automaker dodge additional troubles.

"As we looked at this past generation of vehicles, it did seem to be all about the growth of the company, and there were lapses," Ann Arbor's Randy Stephens, a senior Toyota engineer, told the Wall Street Journal. "We are definitely reforming the processes to be ultra-careful."

Brownlee said the changes won't affect the Technical Center's personnel plans. He said the company is hiring engineers and designers to support various development projects.

"It simply means that we will be even more aggressive in our quality evaluation for all the different parts and components and vehicles that are designed here," he said.

Toyota's sales rose 6.8 percent from June 2009 to June 2010, the company reported last week. But competitors, including General Motors and Ford, had bigger increases.

Contact AnnArbor.com's Nathan Bomey at (734) 623-2587 or nathanbomey@annarbor.com. You can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to AnnArbor.com's newsletters.