![]() ![]() She was planning a final tour for spring 2020 - then, like everyone, had to go quiet, before emerging a year and a half later with a follow-up Snail Mail album, Valentine, released in November. Jordan toured heavily around Lush, playing nearly 200 shows in 2018 and ’19. In a Best New Music review, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal wrote that the album “encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock.” ![]() “Or are you still not sure what that means?” By the time Lush came out in June 2018, Jordan, just shy of 19, was the toast of the indie-singer-songwriter scene, thanks in large part to her pen. Take “Heat Wave,” a single off her 2018 debut album, Lush, when she tells an ex, “I hope whoever it is / Holds their breath around you / ’Cause I know I did.” Or “Stick,” one of the first standouts from her 2016 EP, Habit, which she rerecorded for Lush: “And did things work out for you?” she wails. The incisively intimate rock music she makes as Snail Mail stands out for its ability to put the most difficult emotions to words in sharp, piercing phrases. Lindsey Jordan made her name as a songwriter. Last year Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the Toyota founder, was named as president to steer the Japanese automaker through the global economic downturn, bringing the corporate titan back under family control.“I went from being a teenage indie rocker to a young-adult indie rocker, and that’s kind of weird.” The system demands that workers be multi-skilled and active team members who constantly look for ways to streamline the production system in what is called the kaizen (improvement) system.Īs the trade war raged with the United States due to fast growing Japanese exports, Toyota began joint production with General Motors in 1984 and started its own production plant in Kentucky in 1988.Īlthough the company has long since become a global behemoth, its top management was kept within the Toyoda family until 1995, when Hiroshi Okuda took over as its eighth president. In the 1970s, during the global oil crisis, overseas Japanese car sales surged and increasingly threatened Detroit, paving the way for the trade wars between the United States and Japan in the 1980s.īut western competitors were also intrigued by the Toyota Production System (TPS), which has since become a global model of efficient management also known as lean or just-in-time manufacturing. Twenty years after it was founded, in 1957, Toyota shipped the Crown passenger car as its first export to the United States, before opening its first overseas plant in Brazil the following year.Įarly versions of Toyota cars were often of poor quality and fared badly on American highways, where big was beautiful and gas-guzzlers ruled - but as their quality improved, they gained a bigger foothold.īy 1969, Toyota’s cumulative exports had hit the one million mark. On August 14, 1945, the day before Japan’s surrender, the Toyota plant was bombed, but the company soon ramped up production again, initially on the orders of American occupation forces. ![]() The family company initially reverse-engineered cars from foreign parts and engineers had built a prototype passenger vehicle in 1935 before the company was formally founded, but then focused heavily on truck production for the Japanese military in World War II. The company changed its name from Toyoda to Toyota because, when written in Japanese katakana characters, it required eight instead of 10 pen strokes - making for a simpler and more auspicious logo, since eight is seen as a lucky number in Japan. The founder’s son, engineer Kiichiro Toyoda, had been researching small gasoline engines for years and toured the United States and Europe. at a time when Ford and General Motors dominated car production in the country, making several thousand vehicles a year each. The company started in 1937 as a division of Toyoda Spinning and Weaving Co. The city in central Japan where it was founded has renamed itself from Koromo to Toyota city. Today Toyota employs more than 320,000 people worldwide and makes over seven million cars a year in more than 50 plants in 27 countries. ![]() Japan’s biggest company by revenue, Toyota overtook General Motors in 2008 as the world’s top automaker while the Detroit giant, now part-owned by the US government, went through a painful restructuring drive. More recently, as global concern has grown about man-made climate change, Toyota became a pioneer in hybrid petrol-electric car technology and in 1997 launched the Prius, the world’s first mass-market ‘green car.’ Along the way, the company redefined how cars are made with its “lean production” and “just-in-time” models that have been studied in business schools and adopted by manufacturing industries worldwide. ![]()
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