Toyota suspends LandCruiser 300 orders indefinitely

The world’s biggest carmaker, Toyota, with billions in assets and 400,000 employees, says it can’t make enough cars to meet demand. Here’s the real reason LandCruiser orders have stopped…

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Toyota, the 84-year-old industry-leading multinational carmaker with almost 400,000 employees and $800 billion in assets - King of Mediocrity - it just froze LandCruiser 300 orders in Japan. That means Australia, too.

Heavens - what will Australia’s elite bogans do without their caravan-towing LandCruisers? If you demand answers as to why this has happened. Well, chronic incompetence.

‘Oh what a feeling’. 

Remember back to September 2021 when AutoExpert reported LandCruiser 300 delays could extend to four years, because ‘facts’, and then in October 2022, Toyota Australia fielded a leading in-house sales and marketing wonk to repudiate that claim, with all the corporate weasel-word qualifiers.

Well, interestingly, Toyota has just suspended all Landcruiser 300 orders in Japan, and not temporarily. It’s suspended indefinitely.

Other countries around the world - as opposed to other countries not around the world. 

I think that whole claim is bullshit. It seems to me that Toyota has plenty of production capacity. They’ve been making millions of cars annually for years before the pandemic - no issue there. They just can’t make cars. It’s not a ‘capacity’ issue. 

The wait on a Hybrid Camry is about 2.5 years. They just keep shooting themselves in the foot, and they’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful for about three years now at turning their extreme supply chain vulnerability around. This is the core of the whole car industry’s epic mistake. And Toyota has made this mistake worse than virtually every other carmaker.

Did you know Taichii Ohno of Toyota Motor Corporation (in the 1930s-40s) is considered the father of ‘modern’ just-in-time manufacturing? Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Have Toyota’s accountants cut so lean they became vulnerable to changing times?

Just before Toyota Australia got all antsy in 2021 over media reports of ‘horror’ waits for LandCruiser, Toyota announced it would slash production by 40 per cent. Plenty of production capacity; just can’t make cars. Mainly because they’re just not smart enough to ensure supply chain security. Because, I suspect, beancounters are in charge, not engineers. Oops a daisy. 

That announcement was 11 months ago (at the time of publishing this report).

Then, back in December, Toyota announced a January shutdown at five factories because it bungled the seemingly unimportant component supply security. By January, that shutdown had extended to 11 Toyota factories.

Mass producing cars is Toyota's thing.

They've done it this way for 80 years.

In February this year, Toyota shut factories thanks to a suspected cyber attack. ‘Suspected’. Seriously? It is, or it isn’t a cyber attack - this is a fairly binary proposition.

Then, according to leading press release recyclers at Car Expert, in May 2022, Toyota cut production by a further 50,000 units to 700,000 for May (which is an annualised 8.4 million units - well below Toyota’s nearly 10-million-unit production capacity).

Production capacity is not Toyota’s problem. Toyota has production capacity to burn. And any suggestion they underestimated demand is bullshit, on the balance of probability.

They appear to be claiming this because ‘swamped by demand’ is a concept with better public relations optics than ‘we botched supply and after three years we’ve been unable to fix it’. 

I dunno about you, but I find it hard to have sympathy for a gigantic multinational manufacturing corporation that fails to do the one thing it employs 400,000 people to achieve every day - Make cars. The number of acceptable excuses for this kind of abject failure is zero. To me at least.

Of course, journalists who work for publishers who rely on advertising from Toyota are unlikely to criticise Toyota in this way, irrespective of what they might actually think, privately.

Here in Australia, you have to ask yourself, how long does the wait have to be before the car you want to buy is actually ‘not on sale’? When does marketing it as being available, and taking a deposit, actually become misleading and deceptive conduct?

If you log into toyota.com.au today - this is what stares you in the grille, on the homepage:

The big LandCruiser 300 you want - which you can build and price - but cannot actually buy.

You can even subject yourself to nearly three nauseating minutes of Sean Hanley failing adequately to explain Toyota’s inability to do the one job it has been doing for over 80 years - make and sell Toyota vehicles.

Now, I think I speak for the entire human race when I say I’m kinda sick of hearing corporate PR types deploy COVID-19 as the default excuse for every single problem they face. For the first year or so, sure. But it’s wearing thin - boy who cried wolf style.

Furthermore, the computer chip shortage >> is a crisis that the car industry set itself up for. Carmakers did it to themselves by being so tight-arsed and failing to innovate to newer, better chips, the chip manufacturers went elsewhere >>.

The fact is: Toyota has $800 billion in assets - it has immense resources to fix practically anything. But, of course, with the marketing department at the helm, and a bunch of beancounters as the crew, one should probably be neither disappointed nor surprised if the ship fails to dock on time. Or ever.

Toyota Japan there, once again using words to communicate, but failing to inform. Well done. The firm possibility of a definite ‘maybe’ that things might change at some point in the future. You’ll be among the last to know if they do. Terribly sorry about that, kinda.

I do love Toyota - they’ve become impossibly excellent at being terrible at making cars and apologising for it.

Of course, there might be a bigger problem in play here than they’re admitting to. They do suck at admitting the truth when the truth doesn’t suit them.

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Toyota’s weakness by design?

Andrew Chesterton, over at CarsGuide, or whatever it’s called, speculates that this freeze on JDM LandCruiser orders could free-up the international supply queue. Good for us, potentially. But then he has an ‘each-way’ on that and further speculates that international orders could shortly be frozen. Bad for us.

There is, of course, a third option: TMC could easily have frozen international orders already and just failed to tell the regions because it’s a bad look. Toyota has, of course, lied to 260,000 Australians before.

I would argue that it’s hard to imagine a world where Toyota considers orders for the JDM less important than orders originating in a commercial backwater such as Australia. Australia is great for R&D testing cars, but sales are dismal, comparatively.

A spokesperson for Toyota Australia is quoted by Chesterton as having said:

…before rabbiting on with the usual corporate dribble about how they are all striving tirelessly, beyond the intensity required to pass Navy Seal selection, to get you that CO2 belching twin-turbo V6 diesel barge you’ve always wanted.

And I’d argue that this statement is almost certainly an inversion of the truth. Unmitigated bullshit, in other words. Demand is not what is unprecedented, you Toyota pelicans. Toyota’s abject weaknesses at building cars is what’s historically unprecedented. Have a read of The Toyota Production System >> and see if you can spot the problem.

In fact, Toyota is not swamped by demand - it can make 10 millions cars, no problem. It is swamped by virtue of its own inability to manufacture cars like it used to. There is an orgy of public evidence in support of this claim, and the only reason the media is not calling them out is that they want the advertising revenue, and Toyota is unlikely to support media outlets which identify their indefensible claims for the bullshit they are.

Toyota cannot announce a 40 per cent production cut, and then claim it does not have the capacity to meet allegedly unprecedented demand. The factories are there, waiting, and often idle.

In closing, therefore, let me oxygenate just one additional morsel of abject corporate bullshit from Toyota Australia:

Translation: Sorry, dudes, but for some reason we’ve become especially shit at building those ones.

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