Word: mazdas
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Your article on the Toyo Kogyo Co. [April 26] states that the Mazda GLC is the world's third bestselling model, behind the Toyota Corolla and the Volkswagen Rabbit. You have been misinformed. Ford's Escort is the bestselling car in the world. Estimates for 1981 show Ford Escort at 823,000, the VW Rabbit at 759,000 and the Toyota Corolla...
...Mazda roars ahead...
...companies have survived setbacks as stunning as the one that befell Japan's Toyo Kogyo Co. Ltd., the maker of Mazda cars and trucks, in the mid-1970s. At the time, nearly half of Mazda's vehicles used the revolutionary Wankel engine, in which a rotor instead of pistons produces the power. When the world oil crisis began in 1973, the gas-guzzling Wankels became a sales disaster because they delivered a maximum of only about 15 miles to the gallon. The company seemed headed for the corporate scrap heap. Recalls one executive: "Every day felt like doomsday...
...Mazda's front-wheel-drive compact, known in the U.S. as the GLC (for Great Little Car), has become the world's third bestselling model after the Toyota Corolla and the Volkswagen Rabbit. Mazda's RX7, the only rotary engine vehicle that the company exports, is the second most popular foreign sports car in America...
Toyo Kogyo's road back from disaster started with an appeal to its workers. President Yoshiki Yamasaki asked the company union for permission to shift nearly 5,000 blue-and white-collar workers into sales jobs. Engineers, designers and factory hands were soon manning Mazda showrooms at 110 locations around Japan. Said one union leader of the arrangement: "It was a matter of whether Toyo Kogyo would live or die. We would be jobless if it died." The unions also allowed attrition to slash Toyo's payroll from 37,000 employees in 1973 to 28,000 today...