factories and laying off workers. At about the same time, the Korean War broke out, and being located so close to the battlefront, the U.S. Army placed an order for 1,000 trucks from Toyota. The order helped to rapidly improve the struggling company's business performance. In 1950, company executives, including Kiichiro's cousin Eiji Toyoda, took a trip to the United States where they trained at the Ford Motor Company and observed the operations of dozens of U.S. manufacturers. The knowledge they gained during the trip, along with what the company learned making looms, would give rise to The Toyota Way (a management philosophy) and the Toyota Production System (a lean manufacturing practice) that would transform the company into a leader in the manufacturing industry. Toyota started developing its first full-fledged passenger car, the Toyopet Crown, in January 1952. Prior to the Crown, Toyota had been outsourcing the design and manufacturing of auto bodies, which were then mounted on truck frames made by Toyota. The project was a major test for Toyota, who would need to build bodies and develop a new chassis that would be comfortable, but still stand up to the muddy, slow, unpaved roads common in Japan at the time. The project had been championed for many years by founder Kiichiro Toyoda, who died suddenly on March 27, 1952. The first prototypes were completed in June 1953 and began extensive testing, before the Crown went on sale in August 1955. The car was met with positive reviews from around the world. After the introduction of the Crown, Toyota began aggressively expanding into the export market. Toyota began shipping Land Cruiser knock-down kits to Latin America in November 1955, sending complete Land Cruisers to Burma (now Myanmar) and the Philippines in 1956 as part of war reparations provided by the Japanese government, establishing a branch in Thailand in June 1957, and shipping Land Cruisers to Australia in August 1957. Toyota established a production facility in Brazil in 1958, the company's first outside of Japan. Toyota entered the United States market in July 1958, attempting to sell the Toyopet Crown. The company faced problems almost immediately, the Crown was a flop in the U.S. with buyers finding it overpriced and underpowered (because it was designed for the bad roads of Japan, not high-speed performance). In response, exports of the Crown to the United States were suspended in December 1960. After