Word: toyotas
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...next year. They will be offering what David E. Davis Jr., the dean of auto critics, has judged "a damned nice little car." That is no small feat. No other American company sells or builds any kind of little car without substantial help from foreign partners. Honda, Toyota, Nissan and other Japanese companies have driven away with that segment of the car business, boosting Japan's overall share of the U.S. auto market from 19.6% in 1980 to 27.7% last year, or 2.7 million vehicles. When Chrysler dropped its U.S.-made Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon models this year...
...philosophical nature of Japan's automaking edge was proved once and for all with the success of the first Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio, where American workers build Accords whose quality rivals or exceeds the same cars built in Japanese plants. Following the example of Toyota chairman Eiji Toyoda, Japanese companies in the 1960s and 1970s effectively reworked Henry Ford's theories, replacing his intensely hierarchical assembly-line system with a more flexible team-based arrangement. Japan's efforts have been fruitful. In the past decade the Japanese have built 11 plants in the U.S. and Canada with the capacity...
...sure, automaking has become such a globalized business that the nationality of cars is increasingly blurred. GM owns 38% of Japan's Isuzu, 50% of South Korea's Daewoo Motors, 50% of Sweden's Saab-Scania and 5% of Japan's Suzuki, and shares some manufacturing operations with both Toyota and Suzuki. Those alliances give GM global reach, but the automaker was in danger of evolving into little more than a holding company if it did not relearn how to manufacture competitive cars in its own plants...
Saturn may also lure customers away from other GM products, especially its highly successful Geo line, which is made with partners Suzuki and Toyota. "They're not going to steal market share from the Japanese," says Paul Lienert, editor of Automotive Industries' Insider, a trade newsletter. "It's more likely that they'll cannibalize other GM products, so for the company it will be a net wash in market share...
RABBIT AT REST by John Updike (Knopf; $21.95). Harold ("Rabbit") Angstrom is 56 and ailing in what the author says is his farewell to the character whose life, from high school basketball star to successful Toyota dealer, mirrors middle-class America of the past four decades...