In the first six months of the year, Toyota Motor Corp.'s U.S. sales executives watched with alarm as demand tumbled for one model after another in the lineup. First it was the big Tundra pickup, then large SUVs and luxury models and by June, demand had slipped even for midsize, car-based sport utilities like the Highlander that Toyota was preparing to build at a new plant in Mississippi.
Toyota's manufacturing specialists had ordered the tooling and assembly equipment to produce the Highlanders, but the machines had not arrived. The factory outside Tupelo consisted of four walls and a roof.
At that moment, Toyota executives saw an opportunity to make a swift adjustment to their North American production network, which was producing more trucks and SUVs than consumers wanted to buy.
For the first time in its 50-year history in the United States, the Japanese automaker was confronting the same challenges that Detroit's automakers face on a bigger scale. "This is a shift of monumental proportions that we have never seen before," said Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA, in an interview.