Toyopet impressed Krause family

They gave the small car a test drive, and never looked back.

By Ann Wlazelek
Of The Morning Call

How a Schnecksville family came to own “America’s Oldest Toyota Dealership” boils down to this: The Japanese made quiet doors.

As word spread in the late 1950s that George Krause and his son were interested in a foreign car franchise —because no domestic dealership was available — a man from Japan knocked on their door to show off his only make and model: the 1957 Toyopet.

“My dad closes the door and my grandfather says, ‘Try that again,’ ” said Robert J. Krause, George’s grandson and one of the owners today. At the time, doors on American made cars often leaked and sounded tinny.

Krause’s father opened and closed the door as instructed.

“Boy, that sounds good,” Krause recalls his grandfather saying.

The family was sold on the dealership from that day on.

It took almost a year of international travel and paperwork, but in 1959, the family signed the papers and opened Krause Toyota on Route 309 in Schnecksville.

Now called Krause Toyota and Scion, the dealership expanded with a new line and showroom in Fogelsville in June 1989. Year after year, the business has won awards for its sales.

“We weren’t the first, but we’re the longest in operation," Krause said, clarifying the company’s advertising claim as America’s Oldest Toyota Dealership.

Toyota’s USA headquarters confirmed the claim. The first American Toyota dealership opened in 1957 in Hollywood, Calif., spokeswoman Sona Iliffe-Moon said, but the franchise closed some time after.

Now, Toyota boasts 1,221 dealerships throughout the country and is the nation’s third largest automobile retailer.

The car business was a natural progression for Krause’s grandfather George, a mechanic, and father, Robert B., who got their start selling tractors to a largely farming community in 1924.

The successful venture led the father and son team to add a few Dodges to the lot from an Allentown franchise, then start their own Dodge dealership, which they ran in Schnecksville until two years ago.

Krause’s entry into the family business also came naturally, by virtue of his birth. He started sweeping floors when he was 12.

“I remember my grandfather meeting me each day as I got off the school bus, which stopped in front of the dealership,” he said. “He asked me if I would help clean, which led to a never-ending list of projects.

“I thought later that I wasn’t smart enough to get off [the bus] sooner,” Krause said with a chuckle.

So too it went for Krause’s brother Harry, who is company president, and his sister Mary Kobal, business manager. One by one, as they got old enough, they helped with the family business, and as the joke goes, were paid in Lifesavers, their father’s favorite treat.

Today, with Krause’s son Matthew as an assistant manager, the dealership has spanned four generations.

Selling Toyotas in the 1960s, however, was not nearly as easy as it is today, when the front-running Camry earned Motor Trend magazine’s “car of the year” for 2007.

Krause remembers being teased on the school bus about the name of the early model, Toyopet.

Toyota sold about 240 Toyopets in 1957 before changing the name, Iliffe-Moon said.

“It was a cute name,” she said. But the Krauses were glad it changed.

In the ’60s, products made in China or Japan were considered inferior, Robert Krause added, recalling salesmen at auto shows in the Crest Plaza Shopping Center referring to Toyotas as “junk from Japan.”

Even Iliffe-Moon agreed that the small-engine, 85-horsepower Toyopets were “not tailored for U.S. freeways.”

What helped the company overcome the bias, Iliffe-Moon said, was the philosophy of continuous improvement. Understanding what the customer wanted and needed was paramount to that philosophy, she said, and building a more powerful engine for American cars was the first step.

Toyota also excelled by developing a common production system and conservative approach, said David E. Cole, chairman of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Every plant had the same “DNA,” he said, in terms of parts, methods and new development. And the company took baby steps instead of trying to work too fast, he said.

Courtesy Krause Toyota and Scion

AN AD PROMOTES the Toyopet. Toyota, now the nation’s third-largest auto retailer, sold only about 240 Toyopets in 1957.

“It’s a great formula that everyone is trying to emulate now, the commonizing and standardizing … economies of scale,” Cole said. “They are solid, well-managed, highly focused, not flashy but steady and smart.”

The 1970s gasoline crisis didn’t hurt the foreign auto-maker either, Krause recalled. Toyota made cars that were more fuel efficient than popular Buicks, Cadillacs and Mustangs, he said, so “people took a second look.”

Sales became so good that in 1988 the company bought a second tract of land along Route 100.

When the business got started, Robert Krause and his mother would hop a bus to Newark and drive a couple new Toyotas back to sell a few at a time.

Last year, with 125-150 vehicles on the lot on any given day, the family business sold about 1,100 cars, trucks and SUVs.

KRAUSE TOYOTA AND SCION

• Claim to fame: The country’s oldest Toyota dealership

• Location: Fogelsville

• Generations: Third

• In a nutshell: Sells and services Toyotas and Scions

• Employees: 47

• Interesting fact: Assistant General Manager Matthew Krause, 29, got his name from the “Mid-Atlantic Toyota” franchise acronym. And, he, in turn, named his son “Matthew Robert the 2nd” or “MR2” after the Toyota sportscar.