Toyoda piloted his family's namesake company through the trade tensions of the 1980s. He also represented the Toyoda clan on the board for 57 years, making him the automaker's longest serving director. He is also the father of current Toyoda CEO Akio Toyoda.
TOKYO — Shoichiro Toyoda, the former Toyota Motor Corp. president who led the company his father founded into U.S. auto manufacturing and unprecedented overseas expansion, died Tuesday at age 97.
Educated in engineering at Nagoya University, Toyoda was customarily referred to as Dr. Toyoda inside the company as a nod to his doctoral thesis on fuel injection. The title also helped to distinguish him from Eiji Toyoda, a cousin of Shoichiro's father who preceded Shoichiro as company president. The automaker's U.S. sales surged 49 per cent from 711,993 when he became president in 1981 to 1.1 million vehicles in 1990, before dipping back to 1 million when he stepped aside in the downturn year of 1992. The booming U.S. business underpinned Toyota's explosive global expansion during the 1980s. Worldwide sales climbed 39 per cent to 4.64 million vehicles in 1992 from 3.34 million in 1981.
NUMMI proved to Toyoda, and to the automaker, that investing in American workers would work."A trust was established between the American workers and Japanese management," Toyoda recounted in the book Toyota by Edwin M. Reingold, published in 1999. The steps that led to the automaker's sterling reputation for quality, and to Lexus, all began with a car that was rejected by U.S. buyers as underpowered and unsafe for American roads.
In developing Lexus vehicles,"We asked for precision that exceeded the limits of machine tools in those days, and the production technology side said it was impossible," Toyoda wrote in a multicolumn series called"My Personal History" for Japan's Nihon Keizai newspaper in April 2014. Shoichiro Toyoda joined the company in July 1952 as a board member at the urging of then-President Taizo Ishida, who wanted Toyoda to restore family continuity. But the Toyoda family was absent from the top post at the company until 1967, when Eiji Toyoda, a cousin of Shoichiro's father, reclaimed control as president.
Insiders often attributed the corporate cautiousness, at least in part, to the trauma of the banks demanding the split of the automaker in half in 1950. Certainly, Toyoda always insisted on a very conservative balance sheet, with massive reserves that effectively meant the automaker would never again have to do its banks' bidding.
Okuda was followed by Fujio Cho and then Katsuaki Watanabe. When it came time to replace Watanabe, Toyoda was instrumental behind the scenes in helping position Akio Toyoda as the next president.But the two shared a house in Nagoya and saw each other on a regular basis. No doubt, Akio Toyoda's love of and deep understanding of cars trace their roots to his father. An avid race fan, Shoichiro Toyoda would routinely drag his extended family out to the track.
Although the chairman's post is traditionally a ceremonial one in Japan, Toyoda never completely stepped away. "How many times have you made a mistake?" he demanded of Watanabe during the meeting, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine. He then rattled off a list of errors and chewed out Watanabe for adding big, expensive vehicles to Toyota's lineup.
One of Toyoda's early tasks was spearheading an audacious plan in the late 1950s. The goal: Build an assembly plant with monthly output of 10,000, nearly five times the 2,000 vehicles Toyota was churning out at the time.
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