Akio Toyoda says "“We want to take more risks”, Is the real Toyota coming back? :D Options

[SupraKid]

Toyota admits cars are boring, must change to compete with other cars
This is a good thing. Glad they finally woke up, before its too late like GM did in the 90's.


Toyota, Eschewing Sedate Design, Is Ready for Pizazz
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOYOTA CITY, Japan — After decades of emphasizing staid reliability, Toyota wants to start running with the cool kids.

In a new approach announced Monday, the company, Japan’s biggest automaker, said it was overhauling its development system to give engineers more freedom to experiment with bolder, more daring designs.

“We want to take more risks,” Akio Toyoda, the automaker’s chief executive and grandson of the company’s founder, told reporters Monday at the main design lab at headquarters here in Toyota City, 200 miles southwest of Tokyo.

The company will give more power to its engineers, Mr. Toyoda said, and streamline design decisions, partly by reducing the number of executives involved in reviewing new designs. Previously, design changes could be reviewed by up to 100 executives.

But the engineers will be under pressure to cut costs by using standard parts across different models, Mr. Toyoda said at a briefing at the tightly guarded lab, where reporters’ cellphones and cameras were confiscated.

Toyota will also cede more research and development for emerging-economy nations to locally based teams, allowing designers to shape models specifically to local tastes, he said.

In many ways, Toyota is eager to reinvent itself after three disastrous years marred by problems of its own making as well as those beyond its control. A collapse in trade during the global economic crisis contributed to Toyota’s biggest loss ever, while widespread product recalls in 2009 tarnished its once-stellar safety record.

More recently, last year’s tsunami in Japan and flooding in Thailand crimped production for months. And a strong yen continues to weigh on the company’s competitiveness and bottom line.

But the 75-year-old company is also trying to refresh a design philosophy that has focused more on function, cost and efficiency than form.

Take the Camry, the sensible grocery-getter. Despite its status as the best-selling car in North America, its design has long been the butt of jokes.

“Common descriptors thrown around include ‘appliance,’ ‘beige’ and ‘boring,’ ” a 2011 review by Motor Trend magazine said.

Tokuo Fukuichi, who was named Toyota’s chief designer last year, said that the lackluster design was the product of a consensus-driven process that tried to please everybody and therefore excited no one.

“For someone to passionately like a design, we have to be prepared for some people to hate it,” Mr. Fukuichi said.

The restyled Avalon could be one example. Designers based in the United States had free rein to revamp the sedan, which Toyota introduced at the New York Auto Show last week. Revisions like a trapezoidal grille and wraparound taillights have greatly changed the feel of the vehicle, reviewers said.

At the auto show, Toyota’s group vice president for the United States, Bob Carter, described Mr. Toyoda’s elation on seeing the remodeled Avalon: “Cool! Don’t change a thing.”

Another change Toyota designers talk about is the increasingly central role the Prius gas-electric hybrid is playing in propelling vehicle development at the automaker. Once developed almost completely separately from Toyota’s other cars, many designs original to the Prius, like its low-rolling-resistance tires that help improve fuel efficiency, are now shared with other models.

And in an approach uncharacteristic of Toyota — where executives talk obsessively of listening to customer feedback — Mr. Toyoda said that designers at the company would be encouraged to push ahead without much user input.

“Design should not be a problem of simply making what customers tell you to make,” Mr. Toyoda said.

Asked whether the Toyota design process might soon resemble that of Apple — a company famous for shunning market research in favor of its own designers’ tastes and preferences — Mr. Toyoda was thoughtful.

“Yes, I do think we are headed more in that direction,” he said. “We need to be more visionary.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/business...izazz.html?_r=2

This post has been edited by SupraKid: Apr 10, 2012 - 10:49 PM