Exactly why I'm commenting so much on this. I always tell my team "Pay attention to detail, quality, method. Be more like the Japanese", to now see that even the Japanese (and their quality poster-boy no less) have trouble applying their quality philosophy to software. Not sure where that leaves my advice.
It doesn't change your advice. Toyota has a well-deserved reputation for quality in a lot of areas: customer service (they've been replacing frames on trucks for a few years at no cost to the consumer), construction, reliability, maintainability. That they have flaws in one area just means that they need to apply their practices to that area too.
