Toyota Epic S22
Emigdio Binet
So it was a mix of trepidation and excitement that accompanied our recent summer road trip: an epic journey from suburban DC to the northern tip of Newfoundland. Why? We were taking a Toyota. A 2018 Toyota RAV4, to be precise.
During our road trip, we not only put serious miles on the car but also took it over nearly every kind of terrain. Yes, there was a lot of highway driving, but we also took the RAV4 down dirt roads, off-road, and over water (though that last one was aboard a ferry).
Dual-zone climate control, a 6.1-inch touchscreen display, ECO and Sport driving modes, heated driver and front passenger seats, remote keyless entry, push-button ignition, EIGHT cup holders, and much more.
It gets bonus points for working in Canada (whereas my phone did not, unless I wanted to pay through the nose for international service), but the UX leaves so much to be desired that I still used Google Maps on my phone in airplane mode with pre-saved maps.
Toyota estimates the RAV4 gets 23/30 city/highway miles per gallon. The good news is that, according to my time with the car, these are slight underestimates. Our highway driving FAR outweighed our city driving on this trip, but we still had our fair share of slow, stop-and-go driving, particularly in the national parks and around New York, Boston, and Halifax.
MyCar is a Toyota-licensed car rental company with an exclusive network of all Toyota repair shops all around Iceland. They rent exclusively Toyota cars. The biggest cars in their portfolio include Hilux, Land Cruiser, and raised Land Cruiser.
Moreover, MyCar is a professional and reliable company with a long history. They give you their Toyota quality guarantee. MyCar has also wonderful reviews all over the internet. For us, this was a hidden gem among Icelandic car rental companies.
MyCar also offers its own insurance packages. However, we would recommend going only for the basic insurance package and buying the full insurance with RentalCover, which ends up being cheaper and with better insurance coverage. Feel free to read more on how car rental insurance works in Iceland and how to choose the best car rental insurance.
Isak car rental is a well-known superjeep car rental company with a 15-year long history. It specializes in renting Land Rover Defenders and Super Defenders. It also offers an older but raised Toyota Land Cruiser with the option of having a rooftop tent.
Isak is a great company that I can only recommend. It can have some pretty good price deals, and it also offers some really bigger cars. All of the cars offered by Isak are very much suitable for almost all Icelandic F-roads and dirt tracks.
Isak also offers its own insurance packages. However, we would recommend going only for the basic insurance package and buying the full insurance with RentalCover, which ends up being cheaper and with better insurance coverage. Feel free to read more on how car rental insurance works in Iceland and how to choose the best car rental insurance.
Ice Rovers also offer their own insurance packages. However, we would recommend going only for the basic insurance package and buying the full insurance with RentalCover, which ends up being cheaper and with better insurance coverage. Feel free to read more on how car rental insurance works in Iceland and how to choose the best car rental insurance.
Geysir car rental also offers its own insurance packages. However, we would recommend going only for the basic insurance package and buying the full insurance with RentalCover, which ends up being cheaper and with better insurance coverage. Feel free to read more on how car rental insurance works in Iceland and how to choose the best car rental insurance.
Very comparable to MyCar is also Isak 44 with a wider choice of super jeeps (not just Land Cruiser) and similar pricing. You can get a 10% discount for Isak 44 with code: epiciceland. With the other companies, you will get a slightly bigger car but also for a bigger price.
Hello, Last year we were in Iceland at the end of September and we organized the trip thanks to all your instructions. We rented a Suzuki Jimny and dared to cross a couple of medium-sized rivers. The truth is that we did very well with the car until we did F249, but not until the end since it was dangerous. This year we are going to return we want to do several tours of the highlands. There are several that worry me although we have experience driving on these types of roads. We want to do the F233, F210, F261, F208 southbound, and F88. Can we do them with the Toyota Land Crusier??
Neal Dellett is a Senior Consultant at Simpactful, a CPG/retail consultancy firm. Neal specializes in end-to-end supply chain and has a proven track record of leading organizations to best-in-class results.
00:08 Matt Waller: Hi, I'm Matt Waller, Dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business. Welcome to Be EPIC, the podcast where we explore excellence, professionalism, innovation and collegiality, and what those values mean in business, education and your life today. I have with me Neal Dellett of Simpactful Consulting. Now, Neal has worked with Andersen Consulting as a consultant. You were with Procter & Gamble for 20-some years.
00:42 Matt Waller: And I met you when you were at Procter & Gamble, and I remember someone told me, "Oh you've gotta meet Neal Dellett. Neal is the top Continuous Improvement expert at Procter & Gamble." Then they introduced me to you, and of course, you've done work with the university now on Continuous Improvement, it's really helped us a lot. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Continuous Improvement. I mean, I know when I was a student back in the early '80s, Continuous Improvement, total quality management, just-in-time, these things were big. And when you were at Procter & Gamble, I know I worked with you on a project with a large retailer, and you were actually implementing Continuous Improvement between Procter & Gamble and a customer which I thought was really interesting. You've done a whole gamut of Continuous Improvement projects for manufacturing to physical distribution, transportation, information systems, order fulfillment, all kinds of things.
01:50 Matt Waller: So I wanna talk a little bit about Continuous Improvement for people that aren't familiar with it, but I also, at some point, wanna talk about the future of Continuous Improvement with all of the disruption that's occurring in industry. It seems like there's a lot of room for application of Continuous Improvement. But would you mind just speaking for a little bit about your paradigm, your way of thinking about Continuous Improvement.
02:18 Neal Dellett: Sure. Back when I worked at Procter & Gamble, I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. We were getting ready to implement a Continuous Improvement program in the manufacturing area. We had hired Toyota Consultants to come and teach us. And so I was in the right job at the time and I became the point person for implementation of it in the plant that I worked. And I got the benefit of being trained on how to think about problems, how to break them down to a very detailed level versus working at trying to solve something at a very high level. They actually taught you to look at the smallest level of detail to understand what the problem really is all about, because typically the further that you break down a problem the easier it is to get to the root, and then you could scale it back up to understand the issues. So, one of the benefits I got was how to think that way early on in my career. And so whenever I had different types of assignments, I always went back to one of the consultants I always talked about. You have to go to the floor, you have to look at the data. And so any time I was posed with a problem in my roles, I always looked at... I need to see the data. What's the issue, how do I break this down to the smallest level so that I could then understand what the issue is and then solve it.
03:35 Neal Dellett: And so that's really formed how I think about things throughout my career is when I teach process improvement you have to understand the flow of activities. When you think about problem solving, you need to get into, "Well, what's the equation that I'm trying to solve here?" One of the earliest things I ever learned about was they taught us an example of... In a case study they were trying to teach us to problem solve a lighter that's not working. And so you have to understand what's the equation for fire. It's oxygen, ignition source and a fuel. And as we problem solve, you had to look at how do I understand each of those three elements to see what my issue is? Why is my lighter not striking? So when I go into a retailer and if you're looking at why am I out of stock, you have to understand what are all the different reasons that you could be out of stock and you have to gather data on each of those, because it's a very complex problem. And once you understand all the individual elements, then it becomes a lot easier to make progress and to improve the results that you're trying to get after.
04:44 Matt Waller: And it's interesting because Toyota is such an interesting case, right? In the '70s, most Americans thought of Toyota as being junk. They didn't think it was a high quality car. And yet, by the '80s, we were trying to figure out how come Toyota had such reliable and dependable cars. Toyota is always, if you look at consumer reports, in terms of reliability they've always been a leader. I remember reading a book, must have been 30 years ago, about the Toyota production system when I was in school. Just the whole idea of just-in-time and the production system that Toyota uses. But, I think it's really interesting because when we think about quality, there's really different parts of quality. Toyota is unequivocally the best when it comes to reliability. But there's other types of quality. There's functionality, there's quality in terms of just beauty, aesthetic quality. There's all different dimensions to quality. And of course, Continuous Improvement isn't just about quality, it's also about productivity. So when you're working on Continuous Improvement projects, I would think that it must be really challenging to come to agreement on what you're gonna focus on in terms of making improvements.
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