In April, Automotive News featured a special interview with Chairman Akio Toyoda. He spoke about the Toyota DNA passed down from his great-grandfather Sakichi, the hardships faced during his presidency, and his thoughts on the next generation.
Akio Toyoda had tough climb up Toyota ladder
Indeed, Akio had plenty of doubters as he came up through the ranks. The family’s name was on the vehicles, but the family’s holdings had been whittled over the generations to a token share. Akio said he worked doubly hard to prove his worth.
“When I joined Toyota, I didn’t feel very welcome in the company,” he said. “I’m here because I just continued to live every day, making efforts to someday be a person the company found necessary. My efforts were not just for the company, but I endeavored so that someday the auto industry can also say I have been a necessary person.”
Toyoda eventually realized how the family’s name bore outsized weight. The epiphany came when he was hauled before U.S. Congress in 2010 to apologize for Toyota’s unintended acceleration recall scandal.
“It meant something when I went to the congressional hearing right after I became president and said, ‘Every car has my name on it,’ because I’m the one who said it,” Akio said. “When you manage a company, there are good times and not so good times. But there are moments when what is important is who said it rather than what is said. It can have the power to move things.”
Outside of Toyota, the veteran leader has brought the same mission of making a difference to his role in the wider sector, as a champion of all things automotive, from motorsports and technology to a sustainable workforce.
As chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, Toyoda served an unprecedented three terms, helping lead one of the world’s biggest, most vibrant industries through a turbulent decade of change.
How Daisuke Toyoda might carry family torch into future
Toyoda took the helm just as the global financial crisis pushed the carmaker to its first operating loss in 71 years. And during his initial years, the stormy waters grew even choppier with a global recall crisis that Akio thought might end his tenure and the 2011 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown disaster in Japan. Yet by focusing on a back-to-basics ethic rooted in Toyota’s core principles, Akio piloted Toyota to new heights.
As the company’s “master driver,” he took a personal hand in flavoring the taste of each car’s handling. And his imperative for “ever-better cars” transformed a once-frumpy lineup into something exciting and stylish. Toyoda built Toyota into the world’s biggest automaker, then handed the wheel to CEO Koji Sato with the company chalking record sales, profits and production.
But Akio is really just an extension of a long family legacy. Generations of Toyodas made the Toyota of today that is an irreplaceable pillar of the Japanese economy and an exemplary corporate citizen — a “best in town” company — in every corner of the globe it does business.
And Akio is not the last of the line. His son, Daisuke, has also heeded the family call.
Daisuke Toyoda, 37, joined Toyota in 2016 and is senior vice president of Woven by Toyota, the carmaker’s software and future mobility subsidiary.
The fourth-generation Toyoda at the motor company oversees the Woven City project, an envisioned city-of-tomorrow technology test bed in the foothills of Mount Fuji.
Tellingly, Daisuke shares his father’s need for speed. He competes on the company’s racing teams and is a test driver at the Gazoo Racing motorsports and performance unit.
The chairman, however, is circumspect about how the scion might follow in his footsteps.
“He is my son, but he is a completely different person. He has his own unique life,” Toyoda said. “That is why I don’t think I should train him with the experiences I have had.”
But, Toyoda is quick to add, there is at last one role he does hope will carry over.
“That is the fact that I am a master driver. And for a brand manufacturer, a master driver is the person who decides the taste of the brand,” Toyoda said. “There will probably be a time that the brand taste becomes different from today’s. But it will always be necessary to decide what kind of a taste Toyota will have, Lexus will have, GR, etc. So someday, I hope he will inherit this part.”
Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda, next to the Type G loom in the automaker's Tokyo office March 25, credits the 1925 start of mass production for the weaving machine as a key turning point for Toyota's automaking empire. (HANS GREIMEL/AUTOMOTIVE NEWS)
*The interview was conducted with the interviewer and interpreter speaking English, and Chairman Toyoda responding in Japanese.