Toyota LandCruiser 300: Indefinite production delays nobody wants to talk about
Toyota Australia still can’t tell you when, or if, you can finally have that new 300 Series LandCruiser you’re dreaming of. Here’s why…
Toyota Australia still cannot tell you when, or even if, you can finally have that new 300 Series LandCruiser which has been getting you excited in your trousers.
You know who you are. Here's what's happening right now with LC300 orders, between the dealers, head office and eager consumers like you, stuck in the midst of a global production fiasco.
Toyota dealers have been told, on pain of death (or similar penalty), that they must hold their limited supply of 300 Series demonstrator LandCruisers for six months, minimum, so that over-enthusiastic types like you cannot offer cash to jump the long queue, which presently stretches over the horizon.
Car industry executives and politicians sing from roughly the same hymn-book, and the media has become little more than a transcription service. It leaves consumers scratching their heads, collectively, regarding what the intellectually honest truth is.
Both the corporations and media seem to just run with anything conveniently plausible, in my view, and they get snarky when they get called out about it:
Sean Hanley, public relations managerial-type for Toyota Australia, being rather long-winded there, to confidently confirm that he has no clue when you can actually take possession of your 300 Series, which you’ve paid a large deposit for.
And now, the crescendo of corporate Toyota communications dribble:
‘Evolving situation’ means there’s a problem which they have been unable to fix. Therefore, the bottom line is you can order a 300 Series, right now, using your credit card. But they can’t tell you when, or if, it will be made, nor when, nor if, you might actually get it. Sounds like an effective plan, doesn’t it?
You might like to know it’s serious because they (as I understand) had to convene a virtual roundtable of tame domesticated motoring media >> whom are constrained to comment due to their addiction to advertising revenue, during a lockdown, to spin their inability to supply the first new LandCruiser in 14 years. This is in addition to right-hand drive production of LC300 being inexplicably cancelled for September and October (and counting). I’m not kidding.
Toyota is an 84-year-old multinational corporation that makes more than nine million vehicles annually. It has just shy of 400,000 employees and half a trillion US dollars in assets. It’s richer than some countries. It has a city in Japan named after it. They’re funny like that.
In practise, Toyota’s resources are unlimited. Therefore, anything it gets wrong is, by definition, a weapons-grade failure. Entities such as Toyota play by different rules than you and I. They have the resources to do virtually anything, and their main game is making, distributing and selling cars. So, this is not a novel undertaking, it’s what Toyota has done for a very, very long time, extremely successfully. They ought to know what they’re doing.
The semiconductor microchip shortage? Why don’t they just buy a computer-chip manufacturer? They’ve got the cash.
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What Toyota Australia isn’t tell you
This LandCruiser 300 production delay is even worse of a fumbling than the way they botched the RAV4 Hybrid roll-out, and that was of epic proportions.
The public relations guy there, again, playing the ‘not our fault’ card, seemingly.
In my view, I don’t think that’s the truth. My impression is senior executive Toyota suits in the car industry:
A) kept screwing computer chip manufacturers down on price, making the low-tech and borderline obsolete chips typically used in automotive control systems among the least profitable chips made by semiconductor manufacturers.
Here’s a great insight into the computer chip problem >>
B) When the pandemic hit, those same auto industry suits (mainly accountants) reduced their computer chip orders because they forecast a substantial drop in the demand for new cars. That drop never actually occurred because they didn’t actually understand how consumers were going to respond; accountants rarely do understand the real world. Thus, they were wrong.
C) Simultaneously, demand surged for the more profitable high-tech computer chips typically used in computers, smartphones, gaming consoles and smart TVs, mainly because most of the world was working from home now and under a light version of house arrest in its downtime, thanks to COVID. It was an easy decision for chip-makers to devote production resources to the chips that make the most profit, as opposed to the chips upon which they get taken advantage of.
And D) Car industry shot-callers left themselves vulnerable to exactly this kind of supply-chain disruption by cutting costs as a top priority, instead of spending just a little more to manage the risk effectively by diversifying and investing.
So, no, Toyota Australia, I can’t agree with your proposition that Toyota is somehow a victim here. Although, like every other carmaker, I agree you are a victim of your own strategic stupidity.
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This is the distinctive result flowing from having to apologize to all of those would-be customers, which Toyota still (absurdly) calls ‘guests’.
This semi-apology for an inability to come good on actually supplying a single 300 Series to a customer is pretty insulting to every single Australian customer who has paid their actual money to be part of this exercise in poor planning.
Toyota had one job. And yet…
Is this what an apology looks like, or is it a stuff-up dressed as a marketing exercise?
It’s all just a half apology from a big-corporate with a hidden agenda, written by a spin doctor to engineer a result for the company - it’s hardly an example of heartfelt contrition - and it’s certainly not saying, ‘please forgive us, with no strings attached’.
Just 500 LandCruiser 300s have been hand-picked to tease you, to make you salivate for one, for the foreseeable future. They don’t want you to stop wanting yours. You just won’t be buying one of these future dealer demonstrators, because they’re essentially promotional cars, part of the official media-marketing campaign fleet.
Toyota Australia has 330 dealers, so that’s roughly one 300 Series marketing vehicle per dealer, except for the big city dealers with the bigger sales volumes, which might get two. You’re being sold to.
Oh what a feeling.
I imagine they said something similar in the Pripyat control room on April 26, 1986. Tough job, being Chernobyl press secretary in the mid-to-late ‘80s.
This performance of Toyota’s with the 300 is roughly equivalent to that of ScoMo on bushfires, vaccines and quarantine. The whole, ‘it’s not a race’ thing, except for the fact it is.
The intellectual dishonesty here is breathtaking, in my personal opinion. It’s a weapons-grade fuck-up, neatly wrapped in the cloak of virtue, and denying liability.
Just as bad is that nobody in the media is calling them out on it. That’s what bad incentives look like, commercially, and it’s why ordinary people hate journalists.
How big can a motoring journalist’s trousers possibly get?
You’ve got Nine/Fairfax and News and every other half-baked mis-informational publication begging for Toyota’s enormous advertising revenue, their media vehicles and the fully-funded press launches (when things go back to normal). And every journalist is terrified of upsetting that apple cart.
If you think the dynamics of this situation does not inform the tone of the reports on this, you are insane. All you get out there in the audience is the replication and republication of what these corporate wordsmiths say. This is a gross disservice to you, whether you agree with me or not.
Toyota has dropped the ball, again. No comment about individuals is made - it’s a corporate conduct thing, as a collective. At an individual level, I get the impression Toyota is mainly stacked with people trying as hard as they can, and the same goes for individual journalists. It’s the standard operating procedure that is broken.
Irrespective, Toyota has advised its Australian dealers that they must hold onto the first allocation of media-marketing 300 Series LandCruisers. Imagine the kudos at Dingo Piss Creek, rocking up in a shiny new LC300 Sahara, the first of the first 500 made.
Dealers have to hang onto these first marketing-demonstrators for six months, minimum, even if some Very Important Bogan starts stacking Samsonites full of fifties on the forecourt of Werribee or Dubbo Toyota, or something. How big of a deposit would a hypothetical dealer have to see before they cave in? They’re not big on self-restraint, car dealers, as a breed.
So, all the existing 300 Series Australian pre-orders have been scrapped, and now an allegedly fairer, allegedly more-level playing field has been emplaced, following a heartfelt semi-apology to those Toyota loyalists who’ve already paid their deposit, and marketing onslaught continuation.
On this new playing field, there’s no allocation of vehicle to the would-be Toyota ‘guest’, such as yourself. Nor is there any estimate on delivery timeframe.
This could be you when the Olympics rolls into Brisbane.
So you’re committing your money now, to the firm possibility of likely getting a 300 Series at some time in the future.
Imagine if Apple, or Louis Vuitton, or Breitling did this? Imagine if you ordered a Heesen Octopussy luxury yacht with no clue when it might be moored at your beach house jetty.
Toyota Australia recently admitted to delays of up to six months on Hilux, and up to 10 months on the Jurassic 70 Series. Ten months also on RAV4 Hybrid - itself a vehicle that has spent more time unable to be supplied than actually being for sale during its lifecycle to date, seemingly. But they’re unwilling to even ballpark 300 Series deliveries, so it must be bad.
This is simply the latest in a rolling sequence of corporate botch jobs from Toyota Australia, which has been lovingly ignored by the harbingers of conflicted interests - the mainstream motoring media. Well done, everybody.
No wonder people don’t trust corporations, the media or politicians.
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