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What is usually a festive atmosphere around the highly competitive (and usually ripe with camaraderie) finish of the annual Rallye de Aicha Gazelles is a little bit lower this year after the winning team (and this is where it gets ironic), Team Toyota, was disqualified the final day for cheating the entire 9-day race.

It seems that a Toyota team claiming that there is a mechanical malfunction at fault is just about as ironic as it gets in light of the recent technical malfunctions Toyota has been battling through, but after 40 hours of analysis, race officials have allegedly determined that driver Corentine Quinou and navigator Florence Migraine Bourgnon were manually manipulating the iritrack (satellite tracking device) and odometer of their Toyota Land Cruiser. Reports from Morocco said that the women have a highly unique way of “racing” and hung back most legs but would enter the daily end of leg locations (biovacs) with atypically high scores for catching every check point flag in the shortest distances and in the quickest times.

The Gazelles rally was a lot more difficult this year: road books that are normally full of the 1950′s maps of the landscape (in French, mind you) were basically reduced to pieces of paper that required the navigators to use their compasses, rulers, calculators and pencils in ways more similar to Pythagoras than to athletes out to prove themselves in the desert. In the end, navigators who are usually on top of their game were missing checkpoints, drivers were pushed to their limits and mechanics on site said that they saw damage to trucks that broken in places where trucks never break.

The new road books are controversial, not because of their attempt to raise the bar of the competition, but because the organizers had apparently decided to change the game because they suspected cheating in previous years. Team #138, the disqualified team, had won the rally 3 times and placed 2nd once since 2005. Changing the books was fine but this year’s race saw a whole new level of how it will change again. All of the top placed team were not, in fact in stock trucks but in full on, Dakar-style racing trucks. That is like taking a stock category truck in Baja and telling the team to beat Robby Gordon in a trophy truck. The women raced hard and as much as they say this rally isn’t about speed, this year they went fast.

Team Miller Fisher, the only US team competing in the rally, was in a stock H3. When I say stock, I mean STOCK. Their truck came off of a Parisian Hummer dealer’s lot and had the basic stock for Baja 1000 adjustments made, which is to say, very little. They came in 12th at the end, raising their rank daily from the bottom of the pack. Driver Emily Miller and navigator Wendy Fisher drove a race that they are very proud of after the 1st leg of mishaps. Emily called from Morocco to say that this was the hardest race that she has ever done and min you, this is the 1st woman to win an Iron Man in the Vegas to Reno off road race. In her typical way, however, she quickly summarized the race, spoke briefly about the controversy around Team Toyota and jumped into her plans for next year’s race and wondered out loud how we could get more United States women to want to achieve a rally that will be like one never held before.

It is sad that all of these people came together after so many months of preparation (world class athletes, humanitarians, doctors, organizers, mechanics and passionistas), only to find at the end of their hard work, 2 women were selfish enough to make it all so disappointing. This rally has the Princess of Morocco behind the wheel, the daughter of the head of Senegal as a world class driver and yet, in the desert where everything should have been on level sand, the reality of what some people will do to win, dawned on them all.

When Emily returns to the US, we will be doing an outreach to women and trying to get some more people to try next year’s rally and hope that everyone can start with a clean slate.

The Here, Now and the Recall (History lesson is over. This is where start really giving what is my opinion, is not based in fact and is not meant in any way as anything more than supposition. I am not a mechanic nor should be mistaken for one. I am just asking questions.)

Often, when on the freeways of California, I will look around at the cars driving on the freeway around me and realize that I am completely surrounded by Toyota products. It is the sort of thing that makes seeing all of the “domestic” brands on the road while visiting Detroit seem odd, even exotic for a Californian. My actual experience with Toyota products has been spotty, at best. When we first discussed the Lexus with the floormat/sticking gas pedal incident on The RoundAbout Show, it seemed odd to all of us that a California State Trooper wouldn’t know how to stop a vehicle that was out of control. We were not the only ones.

While I was in Texas over the holidays, I happened to catch an article on December 21, 2009 in the lean Abilene Reporter-News about a local priest who’s Camry rolled and who, after brain surgery to remove a clot as a result of the accident, was told that it was his floormats. Just so you know, when I attempted to contact Father Akamike the last week of January 2010,but he has yet to return my call.

As much as I enjoy the folks who work for the auto manufacturers, I immediately turned my ear to the people who keep their public face: the dealers.

As one Toyota dealer told me, January 22nd, the day after the recall was announced by Toyota, was the longest day of his life. After all of the anguished voices of the car dealers I spoke with last year repeatedly through the automotive market crashing and then the subsequent mess of Cash For Clunkers, it was probably the most sad I have ever heard a dealer speak. Over 65% of this dealer’s inventory was immediately unsaleable. Toyota would not be refunding him for the cars (over 250) on his lot for which he had borrowed money so that he had inventory. He had to wait for a fix. His used car selection, which came from auctions, also hit a wall. Manheim immediately ceased running any used Toyota products through their auctions and that meant other brands of used cars were more desirable, driving up prices of potential used inventory and, moreover, that dealerships couldn’t recoup their investment in traded in Toyota cars because they were not auctionable. The dealerships quickly learned that they were learning more from the media than they were their franchisor. One dealer told me how they were shredding all communications from Toyota Motor Company because employees were so distraught by the immediate, panic induced lack of sales that his team had broken down to physically fighting on the car lot that day.

Toyota is no where near being over this whole debacle. Their dealers are being sent a piece of metal, thinner than a nickel and approximately twice as long, as a mechanical fix which should take their service employees 30 minutes per car to fix. That is today. Last week the part was going to be an entire assembly that would take 2+ hours per car to install. At a national average labor cost per hour of $100, this would have put a serious bit of ouch into the Toyota Motor Corporation and so now they are presenting a fix that costs pennies to produce and install and provides a barrier to keep condensation out of the pedal unit. Make more with less, in the tradition of the Toyota Production System. And yet, isn’t it a mechanical fix for what is rumored to be an electrical problem? Isn’t this the similar small piece of engineering that caused so much problem for the Pinto? In this mechanical fix, doesn’t the little part being installed in the recalled vehicles with the driver being able to put their foot under the pedal and bring it back up if it should happen to stick? If it is possible that it is from condensation building up inside the system, can that little fix-part in a prevent this? What exactly did Toyota learn in a joint venture in an American designed production line, ie, NUMMI? Did GM walk away with more than an education in lean production if the Vibe is based on a Toyota designed platform that potentially have the same acceleration issues? Is communicating to your dealers through the media another example of doing more with less? Is the American public not able to handle a clear concise message like the UK public?

This recall is nowhere near being ready to be drawn to a quiet close. The fact is that the 1st incident that was brought to national and international awareness was a Lexus, not specifically Toyota in brand, and no Lexus have been recalled in this current wave. Why is that? Is it because Toyota Corporate communications originally dismissed it as a floormat issue and they don’t want to get caught telling a fib? Is this why it is rumored that Toyota wants to do a blood alcohol analysis of the state trooper in the original fatal crash in the Lexus? Can discrediting a dead man save a car company? Because all of the recalled cars and those that have not yet been recalled have such elaborate electrical systems, can an over-rev limiter be thrown in neutral while driving at 3800 rpms? Can a career state trooper trained in deductive reasoning really not be the issue?

My friend Jessica told me that her children are not allowed to ride in anyone’s Toyota cars. Honestly, I am more scared of my child being on a road where anyone is in a Toyota or a Lexus right now. Whether it be a stuck pedal or a mischievous floormat or the accidental acceleration issue that began becoming part of the discussion about Toyota, being on the road surrounded by a huge number of cars that could potentially crash is terrifying until someone gets to the bottom of it all.

Photo: Toyota Industries Corporation

The Beginning

This is the Type-G Toyoda Automatic Loom with Non-stop Shuttle Change Motion which was developed by Sakichi Toyoda. This loom was considered revolutionary for its speed and efficiency and was sold to a British textile company for the equivalent of 1 million yen in 1929. Great-grandfather Toyoda provided the seed money from his sale of the Type-G Automatic Loom to start, with his son Kiichiro, the Toyota Motor Company and hence, the Type-G loom gave life to the Type A engine and Toyota Motor Corporation.

• - Note #1: The Toyoda family business of making looms was known as Toyota Industries because the word “toyoda” means “fertile rice paddies” and associating with a farming background just wasn’t considered progressive. It is also said that the family considered 8 brush strokes in Toyota more fortuitous than the 10 brush strokes in Toyoda.   Lesson #1: The Toyoda family was firmly on its way to understanding how to sculpt public perception and convince itself of prosperity by self-design.
• - Note #2: Sakichi Toyoda’s loom was a technological achievement in implementing the principle of Jidoka , a system in which the machine stops itself when a problem occurs. This became an integral part of the Toyota manufacturing process, allowing for a more lean operating staff. Lesson #2: Toyota was built on the principal that good engineering was at the core of allowing a manufacturing based business to grow with maximum labor and minimal technological distractions.
• - Note #3: Kiichiro Toyoda took his father, Sakichi’s, ideas to a new level by introducing the method of The 5 Whys, a problem-solving technique designed to learn the root of a problem and more quickly develop a solution. Together with his father’s ideas, this became a way of improving quality, reducing cost and increasing efficiencies. Lesson #3: The Toyodas were giving life to a new way of thinking through a problem: asking why, why and why would eventually lead to a solution.

The Celica

The Bit in the Middle

The Toyoda family continued building Toyota Motor Corporation and finally, due to the oil crisis in the early-1970′s, began to get a foothold in the North American market by introducing small cars with better fuel economy than its US produced competitors. They were successful in the level of quality they had because smaller economical cars manufactured and sold in the US were considered entry level and therefore, sub-par and were with lower quality standards. In the 1980′s, due to a tariff imposed on imported vehicles, Toyota began manufacturing in the United States. Let’s just jump to the notes and lessons here because that is where the real story continues.

• - Note #4: The Toyodas’ commitment to Jidoka and the 5 Whys gave way to an entirely new way of manufacturing cars, specifically the Just In Time (JIT) principal and the Toyota Production System (TPS). JIT is an inventory driven process that determines the best return on investment by assuring that parts and product are not manufactured before they are needed, thereby increasing the capital and labor and increasing the return on investment. JIT and TPS were both inspired by a visit by the Toyota engineers in the US to a Piggly Wiggly.  Lesson #4: JIT meant that Toyota was producing like clockwork. Once the product was designed it meant that, like Santa’s toy factory, product just popped out of a system that ticked along.
• - Note #5: Toyota began manufacturing in Fremont, CA (as part of the philosophy of creating and manufacturing for the local sales market) with GM at a plant that became known as NUMMI. This joint venture with GM gave Toyota a supplier and employee base that was multi-generational because of the base of previous automotive plants in the area and gave GM the ability to adapt the lean methods of JIT, TPS and Jidoka to their own assembly techniques. Lesson #5: The opportunities at NUMMI were supposed to be mutually beneficial while the 2 companies learned from one another. Toyota got American corporate design tastes and unionized employees and GM got more lean production techniques.
• - Note #6: Toyota began making larger than entry level cars and introduced its luxury brand, Lexus, in response to market demand. Lesson #6: We all know where this lesson is heading now, don’t we?

Part 2 is here.