The business said on Tuesday that Akio Toyoda’s father, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) founder Shoichiro Toyoda, passed away from heart failure. He was 97.
Toyoda joined Toyota in 1952, and during his tenure the company expanded into the United States, introduced the Lexus luxury brand and the Prius hybrid, and gained international acclaim for its innovative approach to quality control in production.
His son, Akio Toyoda, 66, the third generation of the founding family to oversee the automaker, announced his resignation as president and transition to chairman less than a month before his death. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida remarked in a message of grief, “Shoichiro Toyoda raised Toyota to become the world’s top carmaker.”
Toyoda, a PhD student in engineering at Tohoku University, recalled his father’s admonition that “an engineer belongs on the factory floor” as advice he would never forget.
He started at Toyota as an inspector, looking for problems with returned vehicles.
After being tasked with driving a Toyota Crown across the country in 1957, he eventually advocated for the firm to begin exports. The car’s sales were eventually cancelled because Americans saw it as too weak to drive safely.
Toyota’s former CEO said, “It was a major error,” after the fact. “Nevertheless, I grew wise to my error of judgement and resolved to create a superior automobile.”
Toyoda was one of the executives of Toyota in the 1960s tasked with creating a “complete quality control” system based on the work of American academic William Deming. Workers were encouraged to give recommendations to enhance output and decrease faults under the approach, which was eventually adopted by other automakers and businesses in other sectors.
Toyoda subsequently stated in a serialised biography published by the Nikkei newspaper, “The initiative revolutionised Toyota’s company culture.”
In 1961, Toyoda became a managing director at Toyota for his contributions to the company’s commitment to excellence. As of 1981, he has served as the president of Toyota’s sales division.
A year later, once the company’s manufacturing and sales departments had been combined, he became chairman of the newly unified Toyota Motor Corp and remained in that position until 1999.
From 1994 to 1998, Toyoda presided over the Japanese business lobby Keidanren, where he advocated for the deregulation of fast-growing industries including mobile phones and the reduction of the corporation tax rate.
When his father, Kiichiro, had to resign as president of Toyota because of the business’s financial woes, Toyoda joined the company. This was two years after Toyota had received a bank bailout, facilitated by the Bank of Japan.
After recalling how the Bank of Japan saved the automobile in 1950, he declared, “I have not forgotten,” in 2014.
He said that his experience in the business world had taught him that no firm was doomed to success and that most fell on hard times at the 30-year mark.
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