Are Denso Parts Made In China

[Ermelindo Klatt]

Thecompany develops and manufactures various auto parts, including gasoline and diesel engine components, hybrid vehicle components, climate control systems, instrument clusters, airbag systems, pre-crash radar systems, and spark plugs. DENSO also develops and manufactures non-automotive components, such as household heating equipment and industrial robots. A Denso industrial robot gained wide public attention in Japan when it conducted a game of shogi against professional players.[9][10]

In June 2020, DENSO announced the opening of its "Electrification Innovation Center" at its plant in Anjō. The facility will support the company's development of products and technologies for electric and hybrid vehicles.[11]

DENSO Wave is a subsidiary that produces automatic identification products (barcode readers and related products), industrial robots, and programmable logic controllers.[12] They are noted for creating the two-dimensional QR code, are a member of the Japan Robot Association, and support the ORiN standard.

In 1970, DENSO Corporation decided to expand overseas from Kariya, Japan, to North America. DENSO Sales California, Inc., was founded in Hawthorne, California, in March 1971. The company was staffed with only 12 associates, four of them being Americans. The objective of DENSO Sales California was to promote their air conditioner systems as options in Japanese-made vehicles.

In September 1975, DENSO International America opened a service center in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This was opened due to an agricultural parts contract with John Deere that included starter motors and meters.

DENSO International America employs over 17,000 people at 38 locations between North, Central, and South America. At year end, on March 31, 2008, combined sales totaled $8.3 billion for all American locations.[13][14]

As Denso is a part of the Toyota Group, it also assists Toyota in participating and developing their cars for different motorsports categories. Denso manufactures customised electronics and different auto-parts specifically for Toyota-Lexus motorsports development divisions Toyota Racing Development and the European motorsports facility of the company Toyota Gazoo Racing previously named Toyota Motorsports GmbH located in Germany. Denso plays a vital role as an OEM by specifically engineering auto-parts and electronics for Toyota in motorsports which mainly include spark plugs, starter motors, fuel pumps, alternators, Engine Control Module (ECM) computer systems, engine & transmission sensors and many other high-performance automotive and motor racing equipments and accessories for Toyota to compete in a variety of motorsports categories which include NASCAR, Formula One (from 2002-2009), World Rally Championship, and World Endurance Championship. The Toyota TS030 Hybrid, using a Denso kinetic energy recovery system, finished second in the 2013 24 Hours of Le Mans.

On January 30, 2012, the US Justice Department announced after two years of investigation that it had discovered part of a massive price fixing scheme in which Denso and Yazaki played a significant role. The conspiracy, which fixed prices and allocated components to such car manufacturers as Toyota and Honda, extended from Michigan to Japan, where it was also under investigation. Denso agreed to pay a fine of $78 million.[15][16]

In August 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Quebec over alleged defective fuel pumps in a number of Acura, Honda, Lexus, Subaru, and Toyota vehicle models. A separate fuel pump lawsuit was filed for the remaining areas of Canada.[17]

I always thought Denso products were superior to other aftermarket parts and have made it a point to use them and Toyota OEM when I could find them. Most all replacement replacement parts on my Dolphin are Denso. I recently purchased a Denso radiator to install in my 2004 Tacoma thinking by paying more for it I was getting Japanese quality. After less than 1000 miles it failed allowing radiator coolant to mix with the transmission fluid. The result is a blown transmission and thousands to replace. I contacted Denso and exchanged several emails with their senior QA engineer who seemed generally concerned and wanted the radiator for examination. I agreed if they would at least provide me with a replacement. He agreed. I never received the radiator nor any further communications. However, out of all of this I learned a valuable lesson. Their radiators are made in China not Japan. My bad for assuming otherwise $$$.

I am always skeptical about buying parts from Ebay and Amazon. This is a far bigger problem than people realize, there is no way to tell if the part is actually provided by the manufacturer stamped on the box.

A friend who is a certified auto mechanic installed the radiator for me so I failed to inspect it or the box it came in to determine where it was made. The Denso representative asked for a photo of the radiator which I provided and he said lots of their radiators were falsely labeled as Denso. Sure enough, the Denso sticker on the radiator clearly stated it was made in China. Based on that, I assumed it was a counterfeit item. He subsequently admitted it was "genuine" Denso. I did research on the net and found that they have 22 plants in China.

@jr. No, he has not inspected the radiator which I would be most happy and encourage him to do if he will send me a replacement which I doubt will happen. But, if by chance it does, I will have a rapid cool transmission cooler installed thereby avoiding another possible failure. I don't usually get burned twice.

At that time, in the production field the capacity constraint of the barcode system was made up for by using more than one barcodes at the same time. However, since each barcode can store only 20 alphabetic characters or so, workers had to scan as many as approximately 1,000 barcodes per day, making the work less efficient, contrary to what was intended.

Initially, Masahiro Hara tried to respond to the demands from the field by improving barcode scanners; however, he began feeling the limitations of the barcode system. Furthermore, just at that moment, since products were increasingly downsized, creating a code that could be printed in a smaller area was required.

In the case of barcodes, information can be coded only in the transverse direction (one dimension), while in the case of 2D codes, information can be coded in both the transverse and longitudinal directions (two dimensions).

The development team led by Masahiro Hara began to develop a new 2D code system with only two members.

The most challenging problem for the development team was how to make 2D codes read as fast as possible; it is more difficult for scanners to recognize the location of a 2D code than that of a barcode.

One day, Hara hit on the idea of adding, to the code, information that indicates its location, which might solve this problem.

Based on this idea, a position detection pattern, located at three corners of each code, was created. He expected that by incorporating this pattern into a 2D code, a scanner could accurately recognize the code and thereby read it at high speed.

However, developing the shape of the position detection pattern was extremely difficult because when a similarly shaped figure was near the code, the pattern could not be recognized accurately. To prevent false recognition, the position detection pattern had to have a unique shape. The development team members began an exhaustive survey of the ratio of white to black areas in pictures and characters printed on leaflets, magazines, corrugated cartons and other documents after reducing them to patterns with black and white areas. They continued to study numerous printed matter day and night, and at last identified the ratio that least appeared on the printed matter. It was 1:1:3:1:1.

In this way, the widths of the black and white areas in the position detection pattern were determined and scanners became able to detect the code regardless of the scanning angle by finding this unique ratio.

After a year and a half from the start of the development project, as a result of much trial and error, the QR Code system, capable of storing approximately 7,000 figures with the additional capability to code Kanji characters, was successfully developed. This code can store a large quantity of information and at the same time can be read at more than 10 times the speed of other codes.

Next, QR Code are easy to read.

The angles of scanning vary when codes are scanned manually with mobile scanners and codes of parts on manufacturing lines are scanned mechanically. For this reason, to make codes read quickly, the position of each code needs to be recognized accurately.Since each QR code has three position detection patterns, its position can be recognized correctly.

The European Inventor Award has been awarded annually since 2006 by the European Patent Office to inventors and inventor groups of technologically, socially and economically excellent inventions. In 2014, the QR Code development team was awarded the Popular Prize (winner selected from among the finalists from votes by the public), receiving a high evaluation because the QR Code was widely recognized by general consumers in a large number of regions and age groups.

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