Toyota
That all changed at the top of the world’s largest automaker. Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder and CEO since 2009, has been replaced by former Lexus boss Koji Sato as Toyota’s new president and CEO. Toyoda will become chairman.
A large part of the management turnover is the need to embrace battery electric vehicles, an area of huge growth in the industry but one that Toyota seems to be ignoring in favor of hybrids and plug-in hybrids. It is seen that the company responds to gender.
At the press conference, Sato and his new management were faced with a number of questions about the company’s BEV strategy, or lack thereof. BEV is important to the company, but “this is by no means a quick turnaround to BEV,” Sato said.
“With my background as an engineer, I see it as my job to provide new options if something is missing on the menu. Carbon neutrality isn’t a one-size-fits-all problem, it’s a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Sato.
Toyota isn’t the first automaker to see bloodshed at the top in response to its perceived failure to adapt to the EV revolution. In 2019, BMW replaced Harald Kruger as his CEO.
Too much motorsport and not enough talking to normal people?
Sato acknowledged that Toyota has fallen behind in developing BEVs, adding that the company is suffering from communication problems. suggested.
“perhaps [Toyoda’s] A strong connection with motorsport leads to a disconnect between public perception and the density of actual conversations on the development floor.” Recently, Toyota himself raced a hydrogen-burning Corolla race car. bottom.
Lexus takes the lead
But the upcoming team still has a lot of work to do to reach Toyota’s goal of selling 1 million Lexus BEVs and 3.5 million Toyota BEVs by 2030. Models in development, from box-on-wheel automated shuttles to low-floor sports cars that stop at every point in between.
“That said, we believe it is important to optimize our business units by running small first and applying lessons learned with agility rather than setting numerical targets right away. I think it will be led by Lexus and led by Toyota.We need to make agile adjustments while keeping an eye on at least about one million vehicles,” Sato said.
The United States has become one of the major markets for these BEVs, and thanks to last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, BEVs must be assembled in North America to qualify for the federal tax credit. To that end, Toyota may manufacture BEVs at its own plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, Nikkei Sangyo Nippo reports. The automaker is already in the process of setting up a battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, as part of his $3.4 billion investment in batteries for the U.S. market.
According to Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Toyota plans to manufacture 10,000 BEVs per month in Kentucky by 2025. In contrast, in 2022 he will only build 24,000 BEVs worldwide.
