Originally Posted by TRDFantasy

How often do ECUs break thought, apart from an accident? It's a pretty rare thing I would say. If you look purely at material costs, I think replacing one of these would be cheaper than say replacing a couple or a dozen of the old ECUs.

The way I see it is the huge number of ECUs before meant they were all quite specialized and economies of scale would not help a great deal in reducing the costs. With these new ECUs not only is the amount of raw material reduced, lowering costs, but these new ECUs are likely more multi-purpose and likely there is greater potential in seeing the cost of them lower through better economies of scale. The electrical systems on the new Crown were also simplified compared to the previous generation.

Also consider it's likely to require less time and labour to install four ECUs compared to the 60 that were on the previous generation.

Originally Posted by ES350Bob

Part of what Watanabe needs to include in his "big picture" approach is the BIG QUALIY PROBLEM involving numerous Toyota and Lexus models and use any savings and some current cash available to rapidly address them.

This is news the competition drools over IMO.

Originally Posted by bitkahuna

All good points. My only concern is that with 60 ECUs if one goes out I might lose, say, headlight washers. Now a car losing 1 of 4 ECUs has a major conniption/stroke.

Originally Posted by TRDFantasy

Toyota has been addressing it's quality problems since 2006. Quality has been a top priority in the company for 2 years now, you're going to see the fruits of their efforts with future new and redesigned models.