Commentary | The View from Faraway Farm by Arlo Mudgett: A fly in every ointment

Commentary | The View from Faraway Farm by Arlo Mudgett: A fly in every ointment uses a personal account of a reliable 1998 Toyota 4-Runner Limited to argue that supply-chain geography can be decisive for vehicle manufacturing. The author says the SUV, bought used in Wayne, New Jersey, has started “right up” consistently and has been trouble-free, and notes that his father was researching a new Toyota hybrid made in Aichi, Japan. Mudgett explains that Toyota relies on just-in-time sourcing, with components delivered by nearby suppliers to avoid costly inventory. He contrasts this with how other automakers adopted JIT without fully accounting for long-distance sourcing after parts manufacturing moved overseas. The piece also references COVID-related delays, including U.S. truck shortages attributed to chip supply disruptions, and suggests that later pushes for warehousing addressed decentralized problems but can be less cost-efficient than Toyota’s approach.