Paul Nolasco at Toyota sends us a message saying that Toyota has “decided to resume production at the Sagamihara Plant of Central Motor. Production is to start on April 11.”
Why should this impact the Yaris? Please bear with us.
It is too late to reach anyone at Toyota to find out the exact significance of the message. What follows is an educated guess until we can update you with firsthand information.
As previously reported, Toyota had wanted to move the JP domestic production of the Corolla from Sagamihara near Tokyo to the new plant in Ohira in Miyagi Prefecture. This move was planned for March. The tsunami intervened.
The Ohira plant is near the badly mauled port of Sendai. Last we heard was that the plant was cut off from vital gas supply which precluded a restart. End of March, Toyota decided to delay the relocation from Sagamihara “until April or later.”
Toyota was on record that it wanted to restart production in all (or most) plants by mid April. The fact that Toyota makes a point out of the restart of the Corolla production in its old place in Sagamihara COULD mean that the Ohira plant is down for longer. This also COULD mean that the Yaris production COULD be significantly delayed. The Yaris is built for export in the Ohira plant. Ever since a boatload of Yaris had been washed off the docks of Sendai by the tsunami, no Yaris shipments have left port.
Once again, this remains conjecture until we have received background. It is 7 p.m. in Tokyo as this is being typed, and everybody has gone home. We will update you once we know more.
I wish the Japanese people only the best, and that their rebuild is speedy. But the likelihood of fewer Toyotas is a blessing. Our roadways will be noticeably less vanilla. Their PR department now has something else to do besides putting out false propaganda to bury their rampant defect issues.
Maybe it will also reduce the noise of false, regurgitated propaganda in comment sections.
Note that Toyota had been tarred, feathered, shaken down, and subsequently exonerated by the U.S. Government.
As far as the vanillafication of the roadways goes: Cars are bought by people. There is a lot of vanilla on the roads, because a lot of people love vanilla. Quite coincidentally, vanilla is the most popular ice cream taste, leading likewise boring chocolate by a wide margin. Ice cream blogs may argue the virtues of Praline Pecan over Chocolate Marshmallow all they want. At the end of the meal, there is a big scoop of vanilla ice cream on the apple pie.
PS: As Jim Press, when he still was at Toyota used to say: “We make the best vanilla there is.”
This is bad. There’d be less girly cars for dbags to be forced into once gas hits 5 bucks a gallon. More girly cars for Americans!