Original subtitles

On December 21st, 1929, in Oldham, England, a 35-year-old engineer named

Kichiro Toyoda signed away the rights to his father's invention.

A loom. A loom that stopped itself the instant a single thread snapped.

The buyer was Platt Brothers, the biggest textile machinery maker on

Earth. The price was 100,000 British pounds.

That money was never meant for looms. It was meant for cars.

In 1958, his company's first car in America sold just 287 copies.

It could barely keep up on the freeway.

By 1984, General Motors had handed that company its most notorious plant and

sent its own managers in to learn. The company that started out copying

American cars became the company America had to copy.

You are watching where we take apart the machines and the companies that built

them down to the last bolt and the man who tightened it.

This is the story of the loom company that taught Detroit how to build cars.

If that is your kind of story, subscribe and hit like, because the thread that

snapped on that loom runs all the way to a factory floor in California.

Sakichi Toyota was born on February 14, 1867, in a small village called

Yamaguchi, in what is now the city of Kasai, in Shizuoka Prefecture, on

Japan's Pacific coast.

The country he was born into was about to break open.

The very next year, the old shogun's government collapsed, and a new imperial

Japan began racing to catch up with the railroads, steel mills, and factories of

the West.

None of that reached Yamaguchi fast.

The village lived on rice, on the sea, and on cloth.

His father, Ikichi, was a carpenter.

He expected his son to be one too.

So Sakiji grew up with a saw and a chisel in his hands, learning how to

make one piece of wood fit perfectly against another.

His mother, Ei, worked a different machine.

Like most women in rural Japan, she spent long hours at a wooden hand loom.

Throw the shuttle, pull the beater, press the pedal, throw the shuttle

again, thousands of times for a single bolt of cloth.

The boy watched that motion for years, and it bothered him. It was slow, it was

punishing, and to a carpenter's eye, it was badly designed.

As a young man, Sakichi found a Japanese translation of Self-Help, a book by the

Scottish writer Samuel Smiles.

It was packed with stories of ordinary men, weavers and mechanics, and the sons

of laborers, who had changed their world by inventing something better.

For a carpenter's son in a seaside village, it read like a set of

instructions. Japan had passed its first patent law in 1885.

Sakichi decided he would become an inventor.

Not everyone around him understood.

He had no engineering degree, no workshop of his own, and no money.

What he had was wood, his father's tools, and a problem he could not stop

thinking about.

In 1890, at 23 years old, he finished his first loom.

It was made of wood, it could be worked with one hand, and it wove faster and

more evenly than the looms the village women used.

It earned him his first patent.

He kept going.

In 1894, his first son was born.

Kichiro Toyoda came into the world on June 11, while his father was chasing

inventions far from home.

The boy was raised in his early years by his grandparents.

He would spend the rest of his life trying to stand beside his father's work

and then step out of its shadow.

In 1896, Sakichi completed the Toyota Power Loom, Japan's first power-driven

loom. It no longer needed a pair of tired hands on the beater. A belt and a

shaft did the work.

Japanese mills wanted it. The machine was cheap and tough, and the cloth that

came off it was good.

Backed by money from the trading house Mitsui, Toyota looms spread across the

country. and his business grew into the largest loom producer in Japan.

In 1910, Sakichi crossed the oceans to see the West with his own eyes.

He traveled through the United States and Europe and walked through the mills

and factories that had made those countries rich.

He came home with a bigger goal.

He did not want a better loom. He wanted a loom that did not need a person

standing over it every second.

To understand why that mattered, you have to understand two problems every

weaver in the world faced.

First, the shuttle.

That small wooden boat carries the thread back and forth across the loom.

When its thread runs out, the whole machine has to stop so someone can

reload it.

Stop, reload, restart.

Over and over, all day.

Second, the threads themselves.

The long threads, stretched down the length of the loom, are under constant

tension. Sometimes one snaps.

And when it does, an ordinary loom just keeps running.

It keeps weaving, flaw after flaw.

ruining yard after yard of cloth until a human being notices, so a worker could

never walk away.

One person, one machine, eyes locked on the threads.

Sakichi spent years attacking both problems, and this time he was not

alone. Kichiro, now an engineering graduate of Tokyo Imperial University,

worked beside him, and his own work on the shuttle-changing mechanism was part

of the final design.

In 1924, father and son finished it.

They called it the Type G.

When the shuttle ran low, the Type G swapped in a full one without stopping.

It was the world's first automatic loom that could do that. And when a single

thread snapped, the Type G stopped itself.

Instantly. Automatically.

No defective cloth.

No wasted yard.

Read that again, because the rest of this story hangs on it.

The machine knew when something had gone wrong, and it refused to keep making

mistakes. Because of that, One worker no longer had to babysit one loom. A single

person could watch over many machines and step in only when one of them

stopped and asked for help.

In 1926, Sakichi founded a new company to build it, Toyota Automatic Loom

Works, in the town of Korea.

His adopted son-in-law, Risaburo, became president.

Kichiro became managing director.

The following year, the Type G went into production.

It was a sensation.

Mills in India installed more than 200 of them.

and word traveled all the way to England, to the company that had ruled

the world's textile machinery business for nearly a century.

In June 1929, an executive from that company arrived in Nagoya to meet the

Toyotas. He wanted to buy the Type G.

Sakichi was ready to sell.

His son had other plans for the money.

On June 7th, 1929, a senior officer of Platt Brothers named Chatterton walked

into the Nagoya branch of the Mitsui Trading Company.

Across the table sat Sakichi Toyota and his son Kichiro.

Platt was not just another loom maker.

Based in Oldham, in the industrial heart of Northern England, it was the largest

manufacturer of spinning and weaving machinery in the world.

It had been building textile machines since before Sakichi was born, and now

it had a problem.

Toyota Type G looms were showing up in India, one of Platt's most important

markets.

205 of them were already running in Indian weaving mills. If the Japanese

machine kept spreading, it would eat Platt's business alive.

So Platt did what powerful companies do when they cannot beat a rival. It

offered to buy it. The negotiations ran through Mitsui for months.

When the terms were settled, Platt would receive the right to build and sell the

Type G everywhere in the world except three countries, Japan, China, and the

United States.

The price was 100,000 British pounds paid in four yearly installments of 25

,000 pounds each.

In Japan at the time, that was roughly 1 million yen, a fortune.

The family chose Kichiro to travel abroad and sign the contract.

He left Japan in the fall of 1929 and went the long way around through the

United States, where he also hoped to find buyers for the patents.

In the autumn of his journey, Wall Street crashed, and the country he was

crossing began sliding into the Great Depression.

He kept going. He watched the traffic. He walked through car plants, and

everywhere he looked, he saw the same names on the road, Ford and Chevrolet.

On December 21st, 1929, Kichiro arrived at Platt Brothers and signed the patent

assignment. The loom had made the family rich.

What happened next would decide what that money was for.

Sakichi was 62 years old and in failing health.

According to the story the company has told ever since, he called Kichiro to

his side and gave him a final charge.

He had built his life on the loom, he said.

Now his son should build his own life on something new. The automobile.

and he gave Kichiro the plat money to do it. Whether those exact words were

spoken, no one can prove today.

What is documented is this.

In October 1930, Sakichi Toyota died, and his son began spending the loom

money on engines.

It was, by any reasonable standard, a terrible idea.

Japan in 1930 barely had a car industry at all. The market belonged to Detroit.

Ford had opened an assembly plant in Yokohama in 1925.

General Motors followed with a plant in Osaka in 1927.

American parts arrived by ship, were bolted together in Japan, and sold as

fast as the plants could build them.

Japanese attempts to compete had mostly ended in bankruptcy.

To make a car, you needed steel that Japan could not reliably produce.

Castings it could not reliably pour.

Thousands of parts from suppliers that did not exist yet.

The Toyota family made looms.

Kichiro started anyway.

In 1930, in a corner of the loom works, he began researching small gasoline

engines. He studied, he tested, he failed, and he tried again.

Engineers were assigned.

Machine tools were bought.

Money flowed out of a loom company and into a project that produced no revenue

at all.

Not everyone was happy about it.

The president of Toyota Automatic Loom Works was Risaburo Toyota.

Sakichi's adopted son-in-law. His job was to protect the family business.

And the family business was looms, which made money, not cars, which only

consumed it. He was deeply cautious about where his brother-in-law was

taking the company.

Here is where the paradox of this story first appears.

The fortune that paid for Toyota's first engines came from selling the loom.

But the most valuable thing Sakichi left behind was not the money. It was the

idea inside the loom.

A machine that stops the moment something goes wrong.

A worker freed to fix problems instead of watching for them.

Platt bought the drawings.

It could not buy the way of thinking.

And it was not even a good bargain for the Toyotas in the end.

After Platt complained that the technical data it received was not

enough, the payments were renegotiated.

In July 1934, the unpaid balance was cut down.

and the final total came to 83,500 pounds, not 100,000.

By then, it no longer mattered.

On September 1, 1933, Kichiro Toyota formally created a new department inside

the Lume Company, the Automobile Division.

He had no factory built for cars, no car design, no engine that could match

Detroit's. What he did have was a plan.

He would learn from the best car in Japan, and the best car in Japan was

American. The first thing Kichiro Toyota's new automobile division did was

buy an American car and take it apart. A brand new Chevrolet.

Piece by piece, bolt by bolt, the engineers laid it out across the floor

of a loom factory, sketched every part, and asked the same question over and

over. How did Detroit make this?

In the spring of 1934, they bought two more.

In April, a 1934 DeSoto Airflow, Chrysler's radical streamlined sedan, In

May, a 1934 Chevrolet.

Both were stripped down to the frame and drawn line by line.

Kichiro believed the airflow's shape was ahead of its time, and he decided his

first car would wear it.

For the engine, he chose to follow Chevrolet's six-cylinder. It sounds

simple. Copy the best.

But a drawing is not a casting, and Japan in 1934 had almost no one who knew

how to pour a cylinder block that would not crack.

That May, the team began making trial castings for blocks and pistons.

Batch after batch came out of the molds full of flaws.

On September 25, 1934, the first prototype engine was finally complete.

They bolted it into a Chevrolet truck and took it out for a test.

It made 48, maybe 49 horsepower.

The Chevrolet engine it was copied from made 60.

The loom company had spent a year and a fortune to build a worse version of an

American engine.

Kichiro did not quit.

His engineers went back through foreign technical papers and redesigned the

cylinder head with a new swirl-type combustion chamber.

When they tested it again, the needle climbed past 60.

It stopped at 65 horsepower.

In May 1935, less than two years after the automobile division was born,

three prototype sedans called the Model A1 were finished.

They were not purely Japanese.

Many of their parts were genuine Chevrolet components, simply because

Japan could not make them yet. The cars were blessed in a Buddhist ceremony, and

as the story is told, Kichiro drove one of them to his father's grave.

The loom money had become a car, but the government had other plans.

Tokyo was preparing a law to build up a domestic auto industry, and it made

clear what it wanted most.

Trucks. So Kichiro switched his focus overnight.

His team built the Model G1 truck in a matter of months, again leaning on

American designs, this time a Ford truck.

In November 1935, the G1 was announced.

In December, the first dealer began selling it, and it broke.

The G1's rear axle housing kept failing. The design, copied from Ford, relied on

a welding method that Toyota's workers could not yet do properly, and the

joints cracked under load.

It was a humiliating start.

Customers had paid for a truck, and the truck could not carry its own weight.

According to accounts of the time, Kichiro went out personally to deal with

broken trucks and took failed parts back to study them so the same failure would

not happen twice.

Whether every detail of that story is true or not, the principle behind it

would become Toyota's religion.

Find the problem. Go to the source.

Fix it so it never comes back.

In May 1936, an assembly plant went up about half a mile from the loom works.

Out of it came the improved truck, the Model GA, and the first passenger car

the company ever sold to the public, the Model AA.

It was a big car, about 15 feet 8 inches long, roughly 3,300 pounds, a

streamlined body that clearly owed its shape to Chrysler's airflow.

Under the hood sat that hard one in line 6, 3,189 cubic centimeters, about 207

cubic inches, making 65 horsepower at 3,000 RPM.

In Nagoya, it was priced at 3,350 yen.

Only the wealthy could afford one.

Between 1936 and 1942, just 1,404 were built.

That same year, two things happened that shaped everything after.

First, Japan's new automobile law took effect.

It licensed domestic manufacturers and squeezed foreign ones.

Within a few years, Ford and General Motors would close their Japanese

assembly operations and leave.

The American companies that Kichiro had learned from were being pushed out of

the market he wanted.

Second, the company held a public contest for a new logo.

The winning design did something no one had planned.

It changed the name.

Toyota, the family name, means abundant rice field. It sounded like the

countryside. It belonged to a family, not a brand.

And written in Japanese katakana, it took 10 brush strokes.

The new name was Toyota.

Toyota took eight strokes.

And in Japan, eight is a number of luck and growth, because the character widens

as it goes down, like something spreading out into the future.

In August 1937, Toyota Motor Company was founded as its own business, separate

from the loom works.

Risaburo became president.

Kichiro, the man who had built it, became executive vice president.

The following year, the company opened a large new plant in the town of Coromo.

Inside it, Kichiro put into words an idea that would one day shake Detroit to

its core.

Parts should arrive at each step of the line exactly when they were needed.

Not early, stacking up in piles.

Not late, stopping the line.

Just in time.

The town of Coromo would one day rename itself Toyota City.

But in 1938, none of that future was guaranteed.

Japan was already at war in China.

Steel was being rationed, and very soon the government would stop asking Toyota

for cars at all. In 1941, Kichiro Toyota finally became president of the company

he had built.

Risaburo moved up to chairman.

That December, Japan went to war with the United States.

From that moment, Toyota stopped being a carmaker in any sense Kichiro had

dreamed of.

It became a supplier to the Imperial Japanese Army.

Trucks and buses rolled out of Coromo for the military, and the passenger car

program withered. The Toyota family's dream of a people's car became a convoy

of olive-drab trucks.

On the other side of the Pacific, Detroit was doing the same thing on a

scale no one had ever seen.

Ford's Willow Run plant outside Detroit was building B-24 bombers.

By 1944, it was turning them out at roughly one every hour.

General Motors and Chrysler were building tanks.

engines, and guns by the hundreds of thousands.

America called it the arsenal of democracy.

Japan could not keep up. And as the war dragged on, the gaps showed up right on

the factory floor.

Steel ran out, rubber ran out, steel pipe ran out.

In November 1943, Toyota began building a wartime truck called the Model KC.

It was a stripped-down version of its standard truck, rebuilt around whatever

materials were left.

Much of the cabin was made of wood panels instead of steel.

And as shortages got worse, the KC lost one of its headlights.

One lamp, mounted in the center, where two used to be.

That single headlight tells you everything about where Japan's car

industry stood by the end of the war.

On August 14, 1945, American bombers hit the Kuromo plant.

About a quarter of it was destroyed.

The next day, while workers were still clearing the wreckage, Emperor

Hirohito's voice came over the radio.

announcing that Japan would surrender.

Toyota had been bombed by America on the last day of the war.

What happened next says a lot about the company.

On August 16th, the vice president, Hisayoshi Akai, gathered the executives.

Japan would need trucks to rebuild, he told them, and Toyota had a duty to

build them.

On August 17th, two days after the surrender, production restarted, but the

company was in pieces.

During the war, its workforce had swelled past 9,500 people.

By the end of October 1945, it had collapsed to about 3,700.

Kichiro assumed the occupation authorities might ban car production

completely, so he started planning other businesses to keep his people fed and

housed. Then, on September 25th, the occupation command gave permission to

build trucks.

Toyota took the opening. The damaged plant was rebuilt within a year.

and regular production resumed in March 1947.

It looked like survival. It was not.

In 1949, to crush runaway inflation, the American-led occupation imposed a brutal

tightening policy known as the Dodge Line.

Money dried up overnight.

Truck buyers could not pay their bills.

Toyota kept building trucks it could not get paid for.

By the end of 1949, Toyota was on the edge of bankruptcy.

A group of banks brought together under the guidance of the Bank of Japan agreed

to lend the company enough to survive, but the rescue came with conditions.

Sales had to be split off into a separate company, and the payroll had to

shrink. In April 1950, management proposed cutting 1,600 jobs and reducing

wages by 10%. There was one problem. The year before, the company had signed a

memorandum with its union promising there would be no staff reductions.

The workers felt betrayed.

The union walked out. For nearly two months, the plant ground to a halt.

In June 1950, Toyota built only 300 trucks.

Kichiro was trapped.

He had founded the company to give work to thousands of people.

Now the only way to save it was to send a large share of them home.

On May 25, 1950, he told a meeting of the company's dealers that he accepted

responsibility for the dispute and would step down.

On June 5, Kichiro Toyoda resigned as president, along with his executive vice

president and a managing director.

On June 10th, the strike ended. The union accepted the job cuts and the wage

reduction. More than 1,500 workers left the company, most of them through

voluntary retirement.

The company would later say that management swore it would never happen

again. That vow became part of Toyota's identity for decades.

The new president was Taizo Ishida, the head of the loomworks.

Once again, the Loom Company had come to rescue the car company.

And then, just 15 days after the strike ended, North Korea invaded South Korea.

The American military suddenly needed vehicles, fast, and the closest country

that could build them was Japan.

On July 10, 1950, Toyota received a request from the U.S. military for 1,000

trucks. More orders followed.

Within months, the company that had nearly died was running full shifts

again. Five years earlier, American bombs had torn a hole in Toyota's

factory. Now American orders were pulling it back to life.

Toyota's leaders quietly decided that Kichiro should return as president.

He had paid the price for the crisis.

He deserved to see the recovery.

He never got the chance.

In March 1952, Kichiro Toyota died suddenly. He was 57 years old. The man

who turned loom money into cars never saw a single Toyota sold in America.

But the summer he resigned, his cousin A.G. Toyota left for the United States.

His destination was the most powerful car factory on Earth, Ford's River

Rouge. A.G. Toyota was born on September 12, 1913, in Nagoya. His father,

Heikichi, was Sakachi Toyota's younger brother.

A.G. grew up around his family's textile mills, earned a mechanical engineering

degree from Tokyo Imperial University in 1936, and went straight to work for his

cousin, Kichiro, in the brand new car division.

Two years later, Kichiro handed him one of the biggest jobs in the company,

building the new plant at Coromo.

By 1950, Eiji was a managing director.

And that summer, with Toyota barely alive, he flew to America.

The original purpose of the trip was a deal.

Toyota had been negotiating a technical partnership with Ford Motor Company, one

that would bring Ford engineers to Japan and possibly Ford money into Toyota.

The talks had gone smoothly.

Then the Korean War broke out and the deal fell apart almost at the moment of

signing. So A.G. did the next best thing.

He became Ford's first Toyota trainee.

From July 20th to September 8th, 1950, he walked the floors of Ford's plants in

and around Detroit.

Highland Park.

where Henry Ford had launched the moving assembly line, Mound Road, Ypsilanti,

Canton. He also visited Chrysler and a string of the suppliers that fed Detroit

its parts.

But the heart of the trip was the River Rouge.

To understand what Agee saw, you have to picture the Rouge in 1950.

It sat on the banks of the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, and it was less a

factory than a city of industry.

Ships came up the river loaded with iron ore and coal.

On one end of the complex, that raw material went into blast furnaces and

became steel.

The steel became frames, panels, and engine blocks.

Glass was made on site.

Parts flowed across miles of conveyors. And at the far end, finished automobiles

rolled out the door.

Raw earth in, cars out, all in one place.

It was the most famous factory on the planet.

Henry Ford's dream of mass production made real.

Now look at the numbers.

By 1950, after 13 years in business, Toyota had built a grand total of 2

,185 passenger cars.

The Rouge was building around 7,000 vehicles a day.

Let that sink in.

Everything Toyota had achieved since the Model AA, every car from 1936 to 1950,

Ford could match before lunchtime on a single afternoon.

Years later, AG himself would put it even more starkly.

Toyota had been making about 40 vehicles a day.

Ford, he recalled, was making thousands.

A lesser man would have gone home and given up, or gone home and tried to

build a smaller Rouge.

Eiji did neither, because the more closely he looked, the more he noticed

something that did not fit the legend.

The Rouge was enormous, but it was not perfect.

He was genuinely impressed by the quality of American raw materials and by

American machine tools.

Those were real advantages, and Japan did not have them.

But the way the work itself was organized, the methods and the flow, did

not strike him as some unreachable magic.

When he wrote down his conclusions, his message was blunt.

Japan's plants and engineers were good enough.

Its machine tools were the weakness.

Fix the tools and Toyota could build cars as good and as cheap as America's.

That was a bold thing to believe in 1950.

But there was a deeper problem, one AG understood better than anyone in

Detroit. Ford's system was built for one thing, making huge numbers of the same

thing.

Massive machines stamping out the same panel thousands of times before anyone

changed the dyes.

Mountains of parts stacked in reserve so the line never ran dry.

Warehouses full of cars waiting for buyers.

That system only works if you have three things. A gigantic market. A mountain of

cash to tie up in inventory.

and the freedom to hire and fire workers as demand rises and falls.

Toyota had none of them.

Japan's car market in 1950 was tiny, and what customers needed was a little bit

of everything.

Trucks, small trucks, buses, a few cars.

Toyota could not afford to fill warehouses with parts.

It had just nearly died from having too much money tied up in vehicles nobody

could pay for.

And after the bloody strike that had cost Kichiro his job, firing workers

every time sales dipped was no longer an option.

Ford's genius was making many of one thing.

Toyota would have to make a few of many things, without waste, without

stockpiles, with the same workers year after year.

There was no book for that, no American plant to copy.

Toyota could not copy Ford, so it would have to outthink Ford.

AG came home with a five-year plan to modernize Toyota's equipment.

He brought back American lessons on machine tools and materials.

But the real revolution would not come from Detroit.

It would come from a stubborn, blunt-spoken machine shop manager who

had started his career in the Toyota family's textile mill.

His name was Taichi Ono, and his big idea came from an American grocery

store. Taichi Ono was born on February 29, 1912.

a leap day baby. He was born in Dalian in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, far

from the Toyota family's home country.

In 1932, he graduated in mechanical engineering from Nagoya Technical High

School and took a job at Toyota Spinning and Weaving, one of the family's textile

companies. He spent 11 years in the world of thread and looms. He watched a

rival textile company beat Toyota on both quality and cost, and it stung.

In 1943, he was transferred to the car company. He was blunt. He was impatient.

He did not care much whether people liked him. And he carried one number in

his head that he could not shake.

Nine. Back in 1937, Ono had heard from a Japanese factory manager returning from

a trip abroad that an American worker produced roughly nine times as much as a

Japanese worker.

After the war, Kichiro Toyoda gave his company a mission that sounded almost

insane. Catch up with America in three years, he said, or Japan's car industry

would not survive.

Ono thought about that gap for a long time.

An American was not nine times stronger than a Japanese worker.

He was not nine times smarter.

He did not work nine times harder. So where was the difference going?

Ono's answer changed manufacturing forever.

Japanese factories, he decided, were drowning in waste.

Not trash on the floor.

Wasted motion.

Wasted waiting.

Parts made too early and piled up in corners.

Workers standing around while a machine ran.

Defects discovered at the end of the line, long after the damage was done.

Get rid of the waste, and the gap would close on its own.

After the war, Ono took charge of a machine shop at the Koromo plant.

In 1949, he was named machine shop manager, and he began turning that shop

into a laboratory.

His first move came straight out of his years in the textile mill.

A good weaver did not stand in front of one loom all day.

He watched many.

So Ono rearranged the machines so one worker could operate several of them in

sequence instead of babysitting a single machine.

The workers hated it. It felt like more work for the same pay.

His second idea was even stranger.

It came from America, not from Detroit, from the American supermarket.

Ono had read about how these stores worked.

Think about it from the store's point of view.

A customer walks in, picks up exactly what she needs, and walks out.

The store does not guess.

It does not bake 10,000 loaves of bread and hope.

It watches what leaves the shelf, and it restocks only what was taken.

The customer pulls.

The store refills.

Now look at Detroit.

Ford's system did the opposite.

Each department made as many parts as it could and pushed them down the line.

Mountains of engines, frames, and fenders sat waiting for somewhere to go.

That pile of inventory cost money, took up space, and hid every mistake.

If a batch of parts was bad, you might not find out until thousands of them had

been made.

Ono flipped it. On his factory floor, each step of the line would act like a

shopper. It would go back to the step before it and take only the parts it

needed, only when it needed them.

and the step before would make only enough to replace what had been taken.

How do you send that message across a factory without computers?

With a card. A simple paper card traveled with the parts.

When the parts were used, the card went back upstream.

That card was the order. No card, no production.

In Japanese, the card was called a kanban, a signboard.

It was Kichiro's old idea of just-in-time, finally given a working

mechanism. And there was a second pillar.

Ono took it straight from Sakichi Toyota's loom.

Remember the Type G, the loom that stopped itself the instant a thread

snapped? Ono built that principle into Toyota's machines and Toyota's people.

Machines were rigged to stop automatically when something went wrong.

And any worker who spotted a problem had the right and the duty to stop the line.

In Detroit, stopping the line was unthinkable.

The line was sacred.

You kept it moving and fixed the problems later.

At the end, in a repair area full of half-finished cars.

At Toyota, a stop line was a gift. It meant a problem had surfaced while it

was small, where everyone could see it and fix it for good.

Toyota had a name for this idea, G-DOKA.

Ono described it as automation with a human touch.

Almost nobody believed in it at first.

Workers resented the pressure.

managers resented the loss of their comfortable piles of spare parts.

Inside the company, people called it the Ono system, and some had a far less

flattering name for it, the abominable Ono system.

What saved it was backing from the top.

A.G. Toyota protected Ono while he spread the method, one shop at a time,

over many years.

Ono himself would not set foot in an actual American supermarket until 1956.

long after the idea had taken root on his shop floor.

By the early 1960s, Kanban was running across Toyota's plants.

Then the company began teaching it to its suppliers.

It had taken more than a decade, but a loom company now had something Detroit

did not, a way to build cars with almost no waste.

There was just one problem. It had not yet built a car Americans actually

wanted. And in 1957, Toyota decided it was ready to find out.

In August 1957, Toyota sent three employees to the United States with a

car. Its name was the Toyopet Crown.

At home, the Crown was a genuine achievement.

It had been in production since January 1955, and unlike many Japanese cars of

the era, it was not a foreign design built under license.

It was Toyota's own.

Tough, roomy, and well-built, it had become a favorite of Japan's taxi

drivers, who pounded it over rough, unpaved roads every day.

If it could survive Japan's roads, the thinking went, it could survive

anywhere. Two Crowns were shipped from the port of Yokohama as demonstrators.

They became the first Japanese passenger cars officially imported into the United

States. On October 31, 1957, Toyota Motor Sales USA was founded.

Its first headquarters was a former Rambler dealership in Hollywood,

California. The goal was modest by Detroit's standards.

Toyota hoped that selling a few thousand crowns in America, around 5,000 a year,

would spread its costs and bring down the price of every car it built.

5,000. In a country where Chevrolet had sold about 1.7 million cars in 1955

alone, the crown made its American debut at the 1958 Los Angeles Imported Car

Show. Sales began on July 10, 1958, and almost immediately, Toyota learned what

Japan's roads had not taught it.

America had freeways.

Southern California was building one of the most ambitious highway networks in

the world, and American drivers expected to merge into fast traffic and cruise at

high speed for hours.

The Crown had been built for crowded city streets and rutted country roads,

not long runs at full throttle.

It was slow.

One road test of a 1958 Crown took 23.4 seconds to cover a quarter mile.

It was heavy for its tiny engine.

Its four-cylinder displaced about 1.5 liters, roughly 89 cubic inches.

A base 1958 Chevrolet carried a 235 cubic inch six, making 145

horsepower, more than two and a half times the displacement.

Pushed hard on the freeway, the Crown struggled.

It was underpowered, and for what it was, it was overpriced.

By the end of 1958, Toyota had sold 288 vehicles in the United States, 287

Crowns. and one Land Cruiser. In 1959, total sales climbed to 1,028, then they

slid back down.

A-tompy won in 1960, 576 in 1961.

In December 1960, Toyota suspended Crown exports to America.

The company that had studied Chevrolet engine by engine and Ford plant by plant

had walked into the American market and been laughed out of it.

Years later, AG Toyota would describe the Crown as a bitter experience.

but he also said it forced Toyota to work that much harder to build cars that

were right for America.

That is the line that matters.

Toyota did not walk away. It went home and asked why.

And while it figured out the answer, one vehicle kept the brand alive in America.

That single Land Cruiser in 1958 was not a fluke. The vehicle had been born as a

four-wheel drive military truck in the early 1950s, and Toyota originally

called it the Toyota Jeep.

until it realized Jeep was a trademark of Willie's Overland in Ohio.

In 1954, it was renamed the Land Cruiser. It was slow, too, but it did

not need to be fast.

It needed to be unbreakable, and it was.

Ranchers, surveyors, and off-road adventurers started buying them.

For years, the Land Cruiser was the Toyota in America.

Back in Japan, the company was building the muscle to try again.

In 1959, Toyota opened its Motomachi plant.

built for passenger cars.

It was designed to turn out 5,000 cars a month at a time when all of Japan

produced around 7,000 vehicles a month.

And inside it, the Ono system was running.

In 1965, Toyota came back to America with a new car, the Corona.

This time, it had done its homework.

The Corona was built with American drivers in mind. It could hold freeway

speeds. And it came with features Americans took for granted.

but few small imports offered, like factory air conditioning and an

automatic transmission.

It worked.

In 1966, Toyota's U.S. sales jumped past 20,000 vehicles, about three times the

year before.

That same year in Japan, Toyota launched a small, simple, affordable car designed

for the family that had never owned one, the Corolla.

It reached American showrooms in 1968.

It was not exciting. It did not need to be.

It was cheap to buy, cheap to run, and it almost never broke.

Then in October 1973, the Arab oil embargo hit.

Gas prices soared.

Lines stretched around American gas stations.

Suddenly, the giant Detroit sedans that had ruled the road for decades looked

like dinosaurs.

And a small, frugal car that started every morning looked like the future.

By the mid-1970s, Toyota had passed Volkswagen to become the best-selling

import brand in America.

The company that sold 287 crowns had come back to win.

And in Detroit, a question began to spread through boardrooms that had never

needed to ask it.

How are they doing this?

General Motors was about to find out the hard way in a factory it had already

given up on.

Fremont, California, on the southeastern shore of San Francisco Bay.

In the early 1960s, General Motors opened a huge assembly plant here.

At full speed, it could build more than 1,000 cars and trucks a day for

Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, and GMC.

By the late 1970s, it had become one of the most troubled factories in the

entire GM empire.

On a normal day, more than one in five workers simply did not show up.

Absenteeism regularly ran past 20%. Wildcat strikes broke out without

warning. Grievances piled up by the hundreds.

Workers and managers were at war, and the cars showed it.

Quality was terrible.

There were stories of deliberate sabotage on the line, and the line never

stopped. That was the rule.

If a part was missing or a bolt went in crooked, the car kept moving, and

someone was supposed to fix it at the end.

Often, no one did. In 1982, GM gave up. It shut the Fremont plant and laid off

about 5,000 workers.

The Motor City's biggest company had written off its own people as

unmanageable. But GM had a bigger problem than Fremont.

After the oil shocks of the 1970s, Americans wanted small, efficient,

reliable cars.

GM struggled to build them profitably, and many of the small cars it did build

had earned a reputation for poor quality.

Meanwhile, the Corolla kept selling.

And under pressure from Washington, Japan had agreed in 1981 to voluntarily

limit how many cars it shipped to the United States.

Both companies needed something.

In December 1981, a senior Toyota executive met GM chairman Roger Smith in

Detroit. On March 1st, 1982, Smith sat down with AG Toyota himself in New York,

the same AG Toyota who had walked the floors of the River Rouge as a humble

trainee 32 years earlier.

Now the chairman of General Motors had come to him.

Smith's proposal was direct, a 50-50 joint venture.

Toyota would run the factory. The plant would build a version of the Corolla for

GM.

Inside Toyota, Many people hated the idea.

Production managers did not want to open their methods to the competition.

The sales side did not want to hand a rival one of its best cars. They did it

anyway. On February 17, 1983, the two companies signed a memorandum of

understanding at the site where it would all happen.

Fremont. Toyota had chosen to bring GM's worst plant back from the dead. In

Washington, the deal ran into fierce resistance.

Chrysler's chairman, Lee Iacocca, attacked it in front of Congress,

arguing that the world's largest automaker did not need Toyota's help to

compete. The Federal Trade Commission approved it anyway, by a vote of three

to two.

Final approval came on April 11, 1984, with limits.

No more than 250,000 vehicles a year for a set number of years.

The new company was called New United Motor Manufacturing, Incornumi.

Roger Smith was frank about what GM hoped to learn.

The venture, he said, would show whether or not the Japanese system could work in

the United States.

Then came the decision that made GM nervous.

Who would work there?

GM's managers did not want the old Fremont crew back.

Toyota hired them anyway.

About 85% of NUMMI's first workforce came from the shuttered GM plant.

The union came back too.

The united autoworkers would represent the workers, including much of the old

local leadership.

The old GM plant managers were not rehired.

Same building.

Same workers, same union, different system.

Starting in the spring of 1984, Toyota began flying the Americans to Japan in

groups of about 30.

Their destination was the Takaoka plant near Toyota City, the factory that had

been building the Corolla since 1967.

It would be Numi's model.

For many of them, it was the first time they had ever left the country.

What they saw stunned them. Hanging above the Takaoka line was a thin cord.

Any worker who spotted a problem could pull it. The first pull summoned a team

leader. If the problem could not be fixed in time, the whole line stopped.

One longtime Fremont worker, Rick Madrid, later told public radio about

the moment it clicked for him.

He watched a Japanese worker stop the line over a single bolt.

In 20 years at GM, he had never seen anyone stop the line for anything.

In Japanese, that cord was called the and-on. It was Sakichi Toyota's loom.

rebuilt in human form.

Something goes wrong, everything stops, and you fix it before you make one more

mistake. The workers flew home. They rebuilt the plant floor around the

Toyota system, and the man at the top of Numi had a name every one of them would

learn. Its first president was Tatsuro Toyota, Kichiro's son, the grandson of

the man who built the loom.

In December 1984, the first car rolled off the Numi line, a yellow Chevrolet

Nova.

Underneath the bow tie, it was a Toyota Corolla, built by GM's former workers in

GM's former plant.

Under Toyota's rules, in the early weeks, some workers were still afraid to

pull the cord. At the old Fremont plant, stopping the line could get you in

serious trouble.

Old habits do not die in a day, but slowly the cord started moving, and the

plant started changing.

Absenteeism, which had once run past 20%, dropped to a steady 2-3%.

The grievance backlog that had once numbered in the hundreds shrank to a

tiny fraction.

Then the researchers arrived.

A team at MIT was studying car factories around the world.

One young researcher, John Krafchick, compared three plants on the same basis.

GM's plant in Framingham, Massachusetts,

NUMI in Fremont, and Toyota's own Takaoka plant in Japan.

Here are the numbers.

Hours of assembly labor to build one car.

GM Framingham, 31.

Numi, 19.

Takaoka, 16.

Assembly defects per 100 cars.

GM framing them, 135.

Numi, 45.

Takaoka, 45.

Parts kept on hand.

Framing them, about two weeks worth.

Numi, about two days.

Takaoka, about two hours.

Read that again.

The workers GM had thrown away were now building cars with one-third the defects

of a regular GM plant.

They were matching Toyota's own factory in Japan.

In April 1985, A.G. Toyota came to Fremont and stood beside a Chevrolet

Nova on the assembly line.

In 1950, he had come to America to learn from Detroit.

Now Detroit was learning from him.

The Lume Company had taught General Motors how to build cars.

GM had the proof, the data, and the factory all in its own hands.

The only question left was whether GM would actually use it.

General Motors now had the answer key. It owned half of a factory in California

that was proving, with hard numbers, that the Toyota system worked in

America. With American workers.

With the United Auto Workers.

And a plant GM itself had shut down as hopeless.

All GM had to do was copy it. It tried.

GM sent managers to NUMI to learn the system from the inside.

Inside the company, some of these people were nicknamed Commandos.

They studied the Andon Chord.

the teamwork, the con band cards, and they went back out across GM's empire

with a mission.

Convert the rest of the company, one plant at a time. It did not work.

GM was enormous and deeply decentralized.

Plant managers ran their factories like kingdoms.

Many of them had spent their whole careers inside a system where a good

manager was one who kept the line moving and hit the numbers.

Their bonuses rewarded volume.

Stopping the line even to fix a real problem felt like failure one of the

first serious attempts came at gm's assembly plant in van nuys in southern

california which built camaros and firebirds the plant manager came to numi

for help and in cords were installed workers were trained but managers and

workers alike resisted at almost every step the cords went up but the trust did

not come with them unlike fremont van nuys had never been shut down its

workers had never lost their jobs and been offered a second chance the old

habits were still there and so were the old resentments there is a story told

years later by people who were there that captures the whole problem a gm

manager was ordered from high up to make his plant look like numi so he sent

people to fremont with cameras to photograph every square inch they copied

what numi looked like they never copied how it thought in 1992 gm closed the van

nuys plant Meanwhile, the car Numi was building for GM struggled in the

showroom. The Chevrolet Nova was a well-built car, but it was a Corolla

with a bow tie, and buyers who wanted a Corolla increasingly just bought a

Corolla. In 1989, GM rebranded its version as the Geo Prism, and GM's

leadership placed its biggest bets elsewhere.

In the 1980s, the company poured billions of dollars into factory robots

and automation, convinced that machines could close the gap with Japan.

GM also launched Saturn, an entire new car company built on a clean sheet of

paper, partly inspired by what Noomi had shown was possible.

That is a story for another episode.

But neither robots nor a new brand could replace what made Fremont work.

Toyota's secret was never the machines.

It was the cord and the people who were trusted to pull it.

While GM wrestled with itself, Toyota did not slow down.

In 1988, Toyota's own wholly owned plant in Georgetown, Kentucky began building

Camrys. This was not a joint venture.

Toyota was now building cars in the American heartland by itself with its

own system, and it was aiming higher.

Back in August 1983, before Noomi had built a single car,

AG Toyota had called a secret meeting of his top executives.

His question was simple and outrageous.

Could Toyota build a luxury car to beat the best in the world? The project was

codenamed F1, flagship one.

It ran for six years.

It involved some 1,400 engineers, roughly 450 prototypes, and more than $1

billion. And when it was done, AG made a decision that must have stung.

The car would not wear the Toyota name.

Americans did not pay luxury prices for Toyotas. So Toyota invented a new brand.

In January 1989, the Lexus LS 400 debuted at the auto show in Detroit, in

the Motor City's own house.

On September 1st, 1989, it went on sale across the United States at a base price

of $35,000, thousands of dollars below the German flagships it was targeting.

Within its first year, it outsold the rival flagship sedans from Mercedes-Benz

and BMW.

The company that had once sold 287 crowns was now beating the Germans at

their own game.

Then Toyota made another bet that most of Detroit thought was a curiosity.

In December 1997, the same month the world gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to sign

a treaty on climate change, Toyota launched the Prius in Japan.

It was the world's first mass-produced hybrid car pairing a gasoline engine

with an electric motor.

It reached America in 2000.

Hollywood stars started driving them. For a generation of buyers, the Prius

made Toyota look like the future.

By the 2000s, Toyota had a goal it rarely said out loud, but everyone in

the industry understood.

Number one, since 1931, General Motors had been the biggest automaker on earth.

Toyota now set out to take that title.

Plants went up across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Production capacity climbed year after year.

Toyota publicly set its sights on capturing 15% of the entire global car

market. Here is where the crack begins to widen.

The Toyota system had been built slowly, by people who had learned it hand-to

-hand over decades.

Every new plant, every new supplier, every new engineer needed time to absorb

it. And Toyota was now growing faster than that wisdom could travel.

In 2007, GM outsold Toyota worldwide by just 301 vehicles.

In 2008, as the world fell into the Great Recession, both companies' sales

dropped, but GM's fell harder.

Toyota sold about 8.97 million vehicles.

GM sold about 8.35 million.

For the first time in 77 years, General Motors was not the largest automaker in

the world.

The Lume Company had passed the teacher it once copied.

It should have been Toyota's greatest moment.

Within 18 months, both companies would be on their knees.

by the fall of 2008 the american economy was in freefall banks were collapsing

credit froze and car buyers simply stopped buying for general motors

already bleeding money for years it was the final blow the company had lost 38.7

billion dollars in 2007 alone its sales were sinking its cash was running out in

december 2008 gm went to washington and asked for help it received billions of

dollars in emergency federal loans just to keep the lights on. It was not

enough. On March 29, 2009, the White House forced out GM's chairman and CEO,

Rick Wagoner. On June 1, 2009, at about 8 in the morning, General Motors filed

for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a federal court in New York. The filing listed

about $82 billion in assets against roughly $172 billion in debt.

It was the largest bankruptcy of an industrial company in American history.

A week later, GM was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index

it had been part of since 1925.

The company that had been the biggest automaker on earth since 1931, the

company that had once ruled the Motor City, was now being reorganized under

the supervision of a bankruptcy judge.

And as the new GM began cutting everything it could, one item on the

list stood out.

NUMMI. In June 2009, GM announced it would pull out of the joint venture.

The factory that had taught GM how to build cars.

The plant where the Andon cord had first hung over an American assembly line. The

place that had proved, with GM's own workers, that the system could work in

America. GM let it go.

Now the decision belonged to Toyota.

And Toyota was not in good shape either. The same recession that had broken GM

had hit Toyota hard.

Sales had fallen in 2008.

In the fiscal year that ended in March 2009,

Toyota posted its first annual operating loss in about seven decades.

Without GM, the Fremont plant made little economic sense.

It was far from Toyota's other suppliers, and its old joint venture

arrangements were expensive.

On August 27, 2009, Toyota announced that it would stop building cars at

Numi. It was the first time in its history that Toyota had ever closed a

factory. About 4,700 workers would lose their jobs.

Many of them were the same men and women.

or the children of the same men and women whom GM had laid off in 1982 and

Toyota had hired back in 1984.

The teacher and the student had walked away from the same classroom.

And the very next day, everything got worse.

On August 28, 2009, on a highway near San Diego, a Lexus ES 350 sedan

accelerated out of control.

Four members of one family were killed. The car was a dealer loaner.

Investigators later concluded that the gas pedal had become trapped by a floor

mat. The crash and a desperate 911 call made from inside the car became national

news, and it opened the floodgates.

Within months, Toyota was recalling millions of vehicles, first for floor

mats that could trap the accelerator, then, in January 2010, for gas pedals

that could stick.

Toyota took the extraordinary step of halting sales of several of its best

-selling models in America, including the Camry and the Corolla.

By February 2010, the total had reached about 8.5 million vehicles worldwide.

The company, whose entire identity was built on quality, was now the face of a

safety crisis.

On February 24, 2010, Akio Toyota sat down before the House Oversight

Committee in Washington.

He was 53 years old. He was the president of Toyota.

He was the grandson of Kichiro Toyoda, and years earlier, he had spent time in

California working at NUMMI. He apologized, publicly, personally, and

repeatedly. He offered his condolences to the family who had died near San

Diego, and he said something few CEOs ever say out loud.

He told Congress that Toyota had pursued growth over the speed at which it could

develop its people and its organization.

Growth over people.

It was almost word for word the warning built into the system his grandfather in

Taichi Ono had built.

Grow only as fast as you can learn. Stop the line when something goes wrong.

Toyota had stopped stopping.

You can read the collapse two ways.

You can read it as a panic.

A 10-month federal study carried out with NASA engineers who combed through

hundreds of thousands of lines of Toyota software found no electronic flaw that

could cause dangerous high-speed acceleration.

The confirmed causes were mechanical, pedals that could stick and floor mats

that could trap them.

Problems that were real but fixable and blown up by a frightened public and a

feeding frenzy news cycle.

Or you can read it as a company that had stopped listening to its own alarms.

Congressional investigators uncovered an internal document in which Toyota

boasted of saving about $100 million by persuading regulators to limit an

earlier recall to floor mats alone.

And in 2014, Toyota agreed to pay $1.2 billion to the U.S. Justice Department

over how it had misled regulators and the public about safety problems.

At the time, it was the largest criminal penalty ever imposed on a car company.

Honest history holds both readings at once.

The cars were never the monsters the headlines described, but the company

that had taught the world to pull the cord had, for a while, stopped pulling

its own.

On April 1, 2010, The line in Fremont moved for the last time.

The final car to come off it was a red Toyota Corolla.

Then the conveyor stopped.

The lights over the stations went dark.

Along the silent line, the Andan cords hung from their hooks, exactly where

they had hung since 1984.

Nobody would ever pull them again.

Eighty years after a loom that stopped itself for a single broken thread had

paid for Toyota's first car, the factory that carried that idea to America stood

empty. On October 19, 2010, a new owner took possession of the empty plant in

Fremont, Tesla Motors.

At the time, Tesla was a small Silicon Valley startup that had built a few

thousand electric sports cars.

It bought part of the old Numi site from Toyota at a steep discount.

That same year, Toyota invested in Tesla.

The young company got a factory. The old company got a window into the future.

Starting in 2012, the line that had once built Chevrolet Novas and Red Corollas

began building electric cars.

Millions of them have rolled out of that same building since.

The factory that GM had given up on in 1982, that Toyota had brought back to

life in 1984, came back a second time. And Toyota itself recovered.

The recalls hurt. The lawsuits and the federal penalty hurt.

But a Kia Toyota stayed.

He spent the next decade repeating one message inside the company, grow only as

fast as you can build the people to support it.

In 2012, Toyota took back the title of the world's best-selling automaker.

Since 2020, it has held that title every single year.

In 2025, the Toyota Group sold a record 11.3 million vehicles worldwide.

That is more than 4,000 times as many as the 2,785 cars Toyota had built in its

entire history.

By the summer, agey Toyota walked into the River Rouge.

But Toyota's biggest legacy is not a number in a sales report.

It is an idea.

In 1988, John Krafcik, the young MIT researcher who had measured NUMI against

GM's Framingham plant, needed a word for what he had seen, a system that did more

with less effort, less space, less inventory, and fewer mistakes.

He called it lean.

Two years later, a landmark MIT study introduced lean production to the world.

and it spread far beyond cars.

Hospitals adopted it to cut errors in waiting times.

Software teams stuck cards on boards and called the method kanban, the same word

Taichi Ono once used for paper slips on a Japanese factory floor.

Warehouses, airlines, and shipyards borrowed the Andon idea.

Give anyone the power to stop the work the moment they see a problem.

Every one of those ideas leads back to a single machine.

Toyota Automatic Loom Works, the company Sakshi founded in 1926 to build the Type

G, never went away.

Today it is called Toyota Industries.

It became the world's largest maker of forklifts. It builds engines and

compressors for cars. And it still builds looms. The textile business is

now a tiny slice of the company, under 4% of its sales.

But it is still there.

In 2025, the Toyota Group, backed by Akio Toyota, launched a bid to take

Toyota Industries private and bring the founding company firmly back under the

family's roof.

On March 24, 2026, the tender offer succeeded.

At roughly 5.9 trillion yen, it was the largest acquisition ever between two

Japanese companies.

On June 1, 2026, Toyota Industries left the stock market.

Nearly a century after Sakichi Toyota founded it, his great-grandson had

brought the loom company home.

And in London, inside the Science Museum, an original Toyota Type G loom

still stands on permanent display.

Toyota donated it in 2000.

It is the same model Platt Brothers bought the rights to in 1929.

It still works. For collectors, early Toyotas have become something no one in

1958 would have believed possible, the cars people actually want.

A 1958 Toyopet Crown, one of the earliest known Japanese cars in America,

Once used by the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco, sold in 2008 for

$22,322.

A museum bought it. The car that had flopped on California's freeways had

become a piece of history.

The Land Cruiser that kept Toyota alive in America has done even better.

At Gooding & Company's Pebble Beach sale in 2015, a 1965 FJ40 Land Cruiser sold

for $8,2500.

In 2021, at Bonham's Quail Lodge auction, A 1980 FJ40 hardtop sold for

$122,000.

The Toyota Land Cruiser Association has brought owners together for decades.

And on any American highway today, the cars that matter most are not in museums

at all. They are the Corollas and Camrys with 300,000 miles on the clock, still

starting every morning.

Toyota outlived the strike, the bombs, the bankruptcy that nearly happened in

1950, and the one that did happen to its biggest rival in 2009.

It did it by holding onto one stubborn principle.

When something goes wrong, stop the line, fix it at the source, and never

pass a defect forward.

That is the whole story, really. A carpenter's son in a seaside village

watched his mother weave and build a machine that stopped itself the moment

one thread broke.

His son spent the money from that machine copying American cars.

And half a century later, America's biggest car company sent its people to

that son's company to learn how to build cars.

The company that started out copying American cars became the company America

had to copy. And when Toyota forgot its own lesson, raced past its teacher, and

stopped pulling its own cord, it almost lost the very thing that had made it

great. The loom was right all along.

If you have ever owned a Toyota, a Corolla, a Land Cruiser, or any of the

early ones, driven one, or wrenched on one, drop a comment below.

Tell us the model, the year, and how many miles it ran.

before it finally gave up if it ever did the people who drove these machines know

more about what was lost than the people who sold them subscribe if you want to

keep building this archive with us we have the story of another automotive

empire coming next and you will not want to miss how it ends