On the march

IT MAY have been the leanest, meanest manufacturing machine in the world, the champion just about every other firm used as a benchmark. But out in the car market Toyota has arguably been dozing for most of this decade. At home, its cars have been too dull and too dear to attract enough customers grown fussy during the prolonged recession. Abroad, Toyota was clobbered when the yen soared to ¥79 to the dollar: it did not have enough offshore factories to replace exports from Japan, which had become too expensive.