TOYOTA ROAD USA

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At Bodine Aluminum, Lloyd still ruefully recalls the day the new Troy plant produced the first intake manifold to be rejected--after three months and 60,000 defect-free parts. The lapse "was immediately followed by an eight-hour meeting the next day," says Lloyd, who has had to adjust to the Japanese penchant for such talkathons. "Before, if I wanted to do X, I could do X," Lloyd says, "but now we have to meet for three days. They want everyone to be on board." Bodine has cut its initial reject rate from 20% to less than 2%. Even better, Lloyd says, Bodine hasn't had to call a single meeting this year.

Toyota remains un-American, at least as far as the auto industry is concerned, in one key aspect: it is a nonunion shop, a status that is also subject to intense discussion in local communities. Roger Myers, a county commissioner in Indiana who helped bring Toyota to Princeton, was a longtime executive of the United Mine Workers union and sees the new truck plant as a fertile ground for labor organizers. "I know the jobs have to be there before the union is there," Myers says, "but this is still a union community. I think there will be an attempt to organize the plant. Without a doubt, there will be."

Yet within Toyota, executives have been hotly debating whether to bring even more manufacturing to the U.S. from Japan. The most ambitious planners foresee spinning off Toyota's U.S. operations into a new American company, with its headquarters in a city like Chicago and its own listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Says Gieszl: "We're not content with current levels. It's conceivable that we could become the third largest automaker in the U.S."

That will take some doing: Chrysler builds roughly twice as many vehicles in the U.S. as Toyota does. But such talk-- as well as the prospect of precious, high-paying jobs--is music to the ears of town fathers and mothers in the hamlets along I-64. They'd surely welcome the opportunity to be the next stop on Toyota Road.

--Reported by William A. McWhirter and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit