In his first overseas business trip to the US in the late 1950s, Shoichiro Toyoda made one of the biggest mistakes of his career.
Toyoda, then aged 32, gave the green light for Toyota to export its first passenger vehicle, Crown, to America — only to be inundated with customer complaints that the engine was not powerful enough to drive on US highways.
“It was a big failure,” Toyoda wrote in his 2015 book Believe in the Future, Step by Step. “But I took away an important lesson and continued my challenge to develop a high-quality passenger vehicle that would perform well anywhere in the world.”
That challenge took one of Japan’s last great postwar industrialists through the height of the 1980s trade tensions between Washington and Tokyo, the bursting of Japan’s property and stock market bubble and the 1990s banking crisis that dragged the nation into a long period of stagnation.
Toyoda, who has died aged 97, navigated these events with a determined focus on quality, cost efficiency and people. He laid the groundwork for the transition of the group, which his grandfather Sakichi Toyoda originally started as a looms-making business, into the world’s largest carmaker by sales.
“He grew Toyota into the world’s number one carmaker and led Japan’s automotive industry. As chair of the Keidanren business federation, he was also a driving force for the Japanese economy and made significant contributions,” Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida said.
Toyoda was born in 1925 in the city of Nagoya. The eldest son of the carmaker’s founder Kiichiro Toyoda, he had hoped to pursue a career independent from his family business after studying engineering at Nagoya University and receiving a PhD from Tohoku University.
But when Toyoda was 27 years old, his father died suddenly. He was summoned to join the group and learned about running the carmaking business from his father’s cousin Eiji.
“My father never told me to join Toyota and I had no intention of doing so. If he was alive and healthy, I probably would have pursued a different path,” Toyoda wrote in 2015.
Still, following the disastrous first attempt to penetrate the US market, Toyota returned in 1968 with the Corolla, which would become the best selling car of all time.
Toyoda took over from Eiji as president in 1982 and led the company until 1992, overseeing the expansion of Toyota’s global manufacturing footprint in North America, Europe and south-east Asia.
“Toyota’s global strategy began under Mr Eiji but it was Mr Shoichiro who accelerated it,” said Takashi Kamio, a former Toyota communications executive who worked with Toyoda for four decades.
In 1984, as Japanese carmakers grabbed market share from a besieged industry in Detroit and US protectionism ramped up, Toyota began a joint venture in California with General Motors. When the company started production at its Kentucky plant four years later, Toyoda promised to “work hard to become a good citizen of Kentucky and America”. In 1989, Toyota, which until then had been known for affordable compacts, expanded its US offerings with the launch of the upmarket Lexus brand.
At home, Toyoda used his influence as the head of Japan’s Keidanren business lobby to push the government for lower corporate taxes and deregulation during the mid-1990s. Over time, Toyota became a model for corporate Japan. The company also built an intricate network of cross-shareholdings that later raised questions about its governance structure.
But Toyoda himself is largely remembered as a humble man who enjoyed being challenged and was generous with his time. “He was like an emperor in the business world but Mr Shoichiro was always considerate and everyone relied on him for advice,” said Toshinobu Obata, chair of Meidai, the construction group which helped build Toyoda’s home in Aichi.
Toyoda acted as Toyota’s chair for seven years until 1999 and retained the title of honorary chair until his death. He is survived by his wife and daughter, as well as his son Akio, who will step down as the company’s president in April after nearly 14 years.
“I consult my father on various things but he is not the kind of person who gives answers,” Akio said in 2014. “There are still many areas I don’t understand about our honorary chair, who has led Toyota group this far.”
