Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we have reports from Quartz, BetaBoston and The New York Times.
It's no secret a key part of Toyota's success has been how productive the company is. Now if some of us just applied it to our daily lives, we could get a lot more done. I, for one, love Post-its.
Though his background is in automotive engineering, (Jamie) Bonini has based his life on cutting out waste or, in Toyota terminology, "Muda."
As general manager of the company's Production System Support Center, he travels the country teaching non-profits and smaller to mid-sized manufacturers how to be more productive.
License plate scanners are a controversial topic when it's in the hands of law enforcement, but businesses are rapidly adopting the technology – where it's become essential to making sure you're making your payments.
But the main commercial use of license plate scanners remains the auto finance and auto repossession industries, two professions that work closely together to track down people who default on their loans. Digital Recognition lists Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings, and Citibank among its clients, while MVTRAC boasts that it serves 70 percent of the auto finance industry.
Our friend Ben Preston profiles the 1960 Lincoln Continental Mark V, which I think looks pretty cool. That's his point, actually.
Bombastic styling and outrageous dimensions make the Lincoln look like a comic book villain's daily driver, but in the sea of modern automotive sameness it commands the sort of attention an alien spacecraft might conjure up — especially if the U.F.O. were 19 feet long and wore two-tone Pale Turquoise-over-Sapphire paint.
Photo: Getty Images
Buy A Lot Of Post-its So You Can Be Productive Like Toyota