Guilty of generalizing as charged! None of the proceeding is intended to disagree, and I appreciate your insight. Personally I think it's a wee bit too easy to fully credit Japanese involvement with turning the company completely around. For certain Japanese expertise in line production completely changed their focus. Nonetheless changing the production line was easy compared to getting Germans to adopt to it. At that time, Germans considered themselves highly skilled craftsman and weren't likely to adopt well to being timed at tasks, or told how to do their jobs differently. I imagine it was quite a significant undertaking with lots of shouting to get the workforce to work faster, more cohesively and to make less mistakes. In addition to Japanese influences Porsche did many things to turn the company around on its own like releasing a third of its management structure and reassigning the other two-thirds to different jobs to keep them from rejecting change in their areas of expertise. Super smart. Porsche incorporated the ability for workers to make suggestions--very Deming-like--and engineered their own unique way of delivering parts to where and when needed on the line, after adopting just in time techniques. You can also factor in fear of losing your job as Porsche was ripe to be purchased by other German car makers if they didn't turn things around, including BMW, so they were highly motivated to succeed. It's really an interesting story I believe. Something a typical consumer of the day would have been oblivious to. Eventually with the processes and workforce transformed, Porsche was able to cut production times significantly and cut "mistakes per car" in half, all of which enabled Porsche to slim down the workforce thereby greatly cutting operational expenses. Labor costs more than mistakes. And as you mentioned they worked on supplier costs and efficiencies. In the end I mostly believe Germans are going to engineer their own success even if they go to outsiders for assistance. Also interesting that during this time of transformation sales were plummeting due to the ongoing recession. Porsche went from 50,000 sales annually in the 80s to 14,000 by 1993. Only 3,000 Porsches were sold in the US in 1993. Sure the recession, but the public must have been bored with Porsche's offerings too and perhaps more interested in Japanese sports cars of the day like the much more affordable RX-7 and 300ZX, and seemingly exotic Acura NSX. Then along came the Boxster for which Porsche had thousands of orders before production even began. Today obviously Porsche is a very strong company, but like the Boxster that gave them back the demand they lacked 25 years ago to significantly enable the economic recovery, the non-sports car segment is doing the heavy lifting today, so us who buy their sports cars have something incredible to enjoy. Thank goodness Porsche didn't adopt any Japanese design philosophy.

Break, Break

While many here were owning Porsches in the early 80s and 90s, I was only dreaming of that. Sat in quite a few in showrooms back then as a college student. For sure the 911s seemed extremely high quality to me and I'm sure they were especially compared to many other makes. Like a lot of people, it's so easy to fall into the trap of newer is better. But older will always be cooler, more interesting/artful, more mechanical, more involving, and slower too which isn't the end of the world. I'm now almost 56 and when I sold my Cayman R and '11 Spyder to buy my '16 Spyder I decided it's probably my last new Porsche and maybe the sports car I take to my grave, unless a super nice air cooled Porsche comes along that I think will be even more rewarding to own and drive. As I've said before, it took the '16 Spyder for me to part ways with my '11 Spyder and Cayman R. I'm still am a huge 987 fan for many reasons, and not just the special versions. I'm missing some of that modern simplicity.