Word: toyotas
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Conquering the truck market won't be easy either, in part for cultural reasons. Pickup country is perhaps the last auto segment in which patriotic shopping habits prevail. Despite years of knocking at the market, Toyota sold just 107,000 Tundras in the U.S. last year, while Ford sold 916,000 F-Series trucks. Although Nissan and Honda have joined Toyota in the truck market, heavy investment has made Detroit's pickups more competitive than its cars. And Detroit can still count on the stubborn-guy factor. "I'd consider driving a Chevy, but that'd be about...
...more reason Toyota is promoting itself as an all-American brand. The last thing Toyota needs is a revival of protectionist consumer sentiment. Recent ads tout the number of U.S. jobs Toyota has created. The company also became the first foreign automaker to crack NASCAR, entering the Tundra last year in the Craftsman Truck Series, and as a NASCAR sponsor Toyota is beginning to get notice from fans. "Being a Chevy man all my life, I'm starting to look at the Toyotas coming out," said Jared Branan, 24, of Kissimmee, Fla., attending a race in Daytona Beach last January...
...Toyota is the great new American car company, can it stay nimble in the face of increased competition and quality-control challenges? Toyota executives acknowledge the need to build cars and trucks faster, cheaper and better than its rivals. That's no simple task, but Toyota has always been terrific at creating a sense of internal crisis even when times are good, persuading employees that the company will crash unless everyone, from the lowliest shopworker to the CEO, helps out to improve the bottom line. "There's a deep fear of complacency in Toyota," says Jeffrey Liker, an engineering professor...
...more rivals close in, the more disciplined Toyota seems to become. Since the Camry started slipping in the quality scores, managers have drilled into the consumer surveys, reading customer comments to fix peeves as minute as the sound of the trunk latch. As for eliminating waste, says Gary Convis, president of the Georgetown plant, "we're never satisfied." Convis says Toyota has cut the delivery time for custom models from 10 weeks to 10 days, and that his facility has reduced some manufacturing costs by as much as 70%. A group of assembly workers from the plant went...
...numbers of its cars on the street. Today, the company's line of pleasantly stylish, relatively inexpensive and certifiably reliable sedans and sport-utility vehicles is tailgating the industry's best-known brands in several prime markets. In the U.S., where the Sonata offers a lower-priced alternative to Toyota's Camry and Honda's Accord, Hyundai's sales reached 419,000 cars last year?up 360% since 1998. In Europe, sales spurted 21% in 2004. In India, Hyundai's 17% share of the passenger-car market makes it the largest foreign automaker and the second biggest car company overall...