Toyota ain’t ‘American’

Here we go again. Toyota Motor Corp. is poised to open its San Antonio pick up plant, so we’re being fed this tiresome line that Japan’s No. 1 automaker is really an “American company” because it a) directly employs some 30,000-plus in the United States and b) indirectly provides jobs to tens-of-thousands more and c) is preparing to run in NASCAR.

Don’t care. Unless and until the boys in Aichi Prefecture pick up and move their HQ here and list their shares as domestic shares on the New York Stock Exchange, Toyota … now read these words slowly and clearly … will not be an American company. Period.

That said, a few qualifiers. Toyota is the best automotive operator in the business. Toyota is the standard everyone else wants to emulate — see The News on new Ford CEO Alan Mulally or my Saturday column. Toyota is a cash machine, thanks in large part to American cash. And Toyota is on track to become the world’s largest automaker, sooner than General Motors Corp. would care to admit.

But Toyota is also wrestling with dodgy quality, having recalled more cars and trucks from the American market than any other major manufacturer. It’s having trouble staffing growth, which may be contributing to its quality issues. And the Democratic sweep of Washington may make the Japanese automaker’s inability to satisfy the growth from its American plants a bigger political issue that it otherwise would have been.

Why? Because it is being forced to meet demand with output from plants in Japan — not a popular move with Dem politicos whose labor supporters want to know what they’ll do about it. Now.

Don’t begrudge Toyota its success. But please don’t call it an “American company” because it isn’t. All the NASCAR races and Texas truck plants they can muster don’t make it so. They just change the subject.