I talk about this often with friends and colleagues. The entire automotive OEM world took a huge turn in the late 2000s after the market crashed. It's extremely apparent when you compare new Toyotas to old Toyotas. Pre 2010 it's completely normal to see 400-500k miles out of any of them, anything built afterwards has just about as much service bulletins and failed parts as many domestic made vehicles.
I disagree that it’s “completely normal” to see 400k-500k out of any vehicle unless it’s a domestic diesel truck. If the average person drives 10,000 miles per year, it would take them 40 to 50 years to accumulate that kind of mileage. Trucks like Super Duty are used in commercial applications, and therefore accumulate much higher mileage in a shorter period of time.
As far as service bulletins, those are released by ethical companies. They identify a pattern failure, develop a fix, and take care of the customer. Toyota/Honda will just keep replacing the same part until it’s out of warranty.
After the market crashed OEMs had a bit of an eye opener and the focus shifted from making something that will run as long as possible requiring as little work as possible, to something that will run with as little issues as possible for the duration of the warranty for as little spend as possible.
You have to go back further than that. By the 1980’s Japan’s economy was #2 globally, second only to the US. They were in an economic boon, and they had devalued the yen against the dollar through currency manipulation. That allowed them to build higher quality, more expensive vehicles than the competition yet sell them for the same or lower price. That was how they captured so much market share so quickly and gained a good reputation.
By the mid 90’s the Japanese economy went into a recession, and products going forward reflected that. A great example is a ‘97 Camry compared with the next generation ‘02 model. Everything on the new model was built to a lower standard. If you pull the front struts out of both, you’ll see that the ‘97 was steel mounts with ball bearings. The ‘02 used cheap plastic junk that didn’t even last half as long.
Naturally failure rate will go up on any given part, but so do profits which is the main goal of any business. Stuff like this has been proven time and time again too, just look at GM's ignition cylinder recall and the Ford Pinto for example. The manufacturers admitted to knowing about these failure modes but didn't issue recalls earlier because it would have had large impacts to profit, so they chose to circumvent the issue or blatantly ignore it and it bit them where it hurt in the end.
The ignition cylinder issue was a joke; I owned 3 high mileage vehicle with the claimed “defective” switch and never once did it magically turn itself off with what I would consider to be normal keychain weight. As far the Pinto, that was a vehicle designed 60 years ago. Back them, Toyota was selling their Toyopet, which itself was a death trap but sold in low volumes. Honda knew of the Takata airbag defect since the early 2000s, but didn’t report it to NHTSA. Toyota covered up their unintended acceleration fiasco, and it cost them $1 Billion. Let’s not pretend that the Japanese are ethical, admitting wrongdoing in their culture is considered disgraceful to one’s family.
