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October 29, 2007
Fifty years ago this week, Toyota Motor Sales Co. introduced the Toyopet Crown into the U.S. market out of a former Rambler dealership in Hollywood. The car was not a great success and sold only 2,000 models by 1961 before being pulled.
But in 1965 Toyota introduced the Corona and in 1968 the Corolla; combined sales of these models totaled about 125,000 in 1969 and the rest is history.
This week's edition of the authoritive Automotive News includes a 192-page supplement devoted to the anniversary of Toyota's arrival in the United States.
"This is the company that changed the world," it writes in a lead editorial, noting that not only has Toyota grown to challenge GM as the world's biggest auto maker but has had a profound influence on how every other auto maker operates.
"The list of advances is long," it continues. "The single-minded focus on quality, the striving for customer satisfaction, the early emphasis on fuel economy, Lexus, lean manufacturing, collaborative supplier relations, hybrid vehicles."
Automotive News argues that Toyota embodies the combined genius of three giants of the American auto industry: Henry Ford, Alfred P. Sloan (General Motors) and Walter Chrysler who were "respectively masterminds of manufacturing, corporate governance and engineering."
It adds that while there are a number of key individuals involved in Toyota's success, it is "the ultimate team." (See a separate entry outlining the precepts of good business as developed by family patriarch Sakichi Toyoda.)
For his part, Keith E. Crain, publisher and editor-in-chief of Automotive News, writes that Toyota is now part of the American landscape.
"There are more than 1,400 Toyota, Lexus and Scion dealerships across the country. Toyota has assembly plants from one end of North America to the other and component suppliers throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico."
"Toyota dealers are among the most profitable," he writes. "And Toyota still believes that the retail automobile dealer is the company's customer, a philosophy that is unique in the automobile business."
Crain concedes that the gasoline crises of the 1970s gave a boost to Toyota as Americans turned to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. But then they found the cars were well made and reliable and continued to buy them in greater and greater numbers.
Detroit tried to stiff arm the competition over the years, but Toyota met the challenge both by moving manufacturing over here and moving into a wider range of market segments - upscale with Lexus, blue collar with trucks, trendy with Scion and granola crunchy with the Prius.
Indeed, 2007 marked a watershed as Toyota introduced its full-size Tundra pickup truck, thus taking on Detroit in a segment long dominated by Ford and GM, and becoming a sponsor of America's new favorite sporting event, NASCAR.
So all hail a genuine Japanese-American success story - one that we could all learn from.
- Peter C.T. Elsworth
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