GX 460 4/19 VSC recall (Consumer Reports "don't buy" label lifted 5/7)
04-15-10, 10:56 AM
#182
Lexus Fanatic
Agreed, I mentioned this earlier too. From what I saw in the video, the VSC was doing little to control the oversteer.
04-15-10, 12:19 PM
#183
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Considering that Consumer Reports always makes it a point to buy the cars they evaluate on their own, it's more a case of having the recall fix carried out and then they'll retest the GX460 they own to see how effective the fix is...
04-16-10, 08:51 AM
#185
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Toyota crisis exposes internal feud
* Norihiko Shirouzu
* From: The Wall Street Journal
* April 14, 2010 12:11PM
TOYOTA Motor's quality crisis is exposing -- and exacerbating -- a long-simmering internal feud. The battle pits the founding Toyoda family against a group of professional managers, each blaming the other for the carmaker's woes.
Behind the scenes in recent weeks, the skirmishing has grown intense. President Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the founder, has tried to push out one of the non-family executives: his predecessor as president, Katsuaki Watanabe, now vice-chairman.
Not long after the company made one of its massive safety recalls in mid-January, Mr Toyoda suggested to Mr Watanabe, through an intermediary, that the former president leave the auto giant and instead run a Toyota affiliate, according to an executive who says he was told about the move by Mr Toyoda.
Mr Watanabe refused.
The standoff, which hasn't been reported before, is a dramatic example of how the old split between the two camps is bubbling to the surface amid Toyota's crisis. The feud is a distraction for a divided leadership as officials struggle to regain their footing after three months of attacks unprecedented in the company's 75-year history.
Mr Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by non-family predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.
The problems arose when "some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit," Mr Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. He acknowledged the "ultimate responsibility for mistakes... lies in me".
A week earlier, Jim Press -- once the top Toyota executive in the US before he jumped to a rival automaker -- issued a statement declaring: "The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates."
Those executives "didn't have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does," said Mr Press, who had a run-in with non-family Japanese bosses several years ago.
A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on the infighting, saying: "We do not discuss executive changes unless they are formally decided." She declined to comment on the statements by Messrs Toyoda and Press, or to make Mr Watanabe available for comment.
(In the latest problem for the company, Toyota announced today it was temporarily suspending sales of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 after a safety warning by a respected US consumer magazine, AFP news agency reported. Consumer Reports gave the sports utility vehicle a rare "Don't Buy: Safety Risk" rating after conducting tests on the car. In response, Toyota said it had asked its dealers to "temporarily suspend sales of the 2010 GX 460" in the US, but insisted it was "confident that the GX meets our high safety standards.")
Privately, the non-family managers have been waging their own campaign within the Toyota group. They say Mr Toyoda never publicly opposed their profit-growth strategy when the company was widely praised for making big money and surpassing General Motors to become the world's No.1 carmaker. They say Toyota's current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr Toyoda's making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn't ready to run a global corporation.
"Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?" one of Mr Watanabe's top aides said. "One of our biggest social responsibilities is to generate profits and pay taxes. To criticise the company's effort to maximise profits and thus taxes is just complete nonsense."
Hiroshi Okuda, a non-family president who ran the company from 1995 through 1999, has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: "Akio needs to go." The 77-year-old remains a key company adviser even though he gave up his board seat last year.
Toyota declined to make Mr Okuda available for comment. The Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment.
Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor of economics at Tokyo University who has studied Toyota extensively, says airing problems openly is very much part of Toyota's corporate culture focused on kaizen, or continuous improvement. "But it's highly unusual for anybody inside Toyota to publicly criticise certain individuals by name," or to criticise in a way that it's easy for anybody to identify the targets.
The feud dates to the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. Non-Toyodas also ran the company from 1950-67.
By the time Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down as president in 1995, after a stroke, the company was losing market share and risked posting its first loss since 1950. It was vulnerable to a weak Japanese economy, trade friction with the US, and a strong Japanese currency that crimped exports.
A series of non-Toyodas took the helm, beginning with Mr Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr Watanabe in 2009. During their terms, the company revived financially and emerged as one of the most admired and studied companies in the world.
The gist of the Okuda-Watanabe strategy was to take Toyota's globalisation efforts, launched under the previous generation of family management, to new levels. Even though the company had begun to build factories in the US and other markets in the 1980s, it still was seen as largely insular and Japan-focused.
In 1996, Mr Okuda and aides unveiled a new strategy dubbed the "2005 Vision." They aimed to retool the automaker over the coming decade, growing rapidly while relying less on exports and more on factories producing locally in target markets, from Argentina to Thailand to the US. Mr Watanabe was one of the authors of the plan.
To realise this 10-year vision, the executives devised interim "global master plans" to assign resources efficiently to different divisions, along with "global profit management" plans that required sales executives around the world to attain certain profitability goals.
The 2005 Vision also pushed Toyota to implement kakushin, or revolutionary innovations, in vehicle design and manufacturing. That included efficiency drives to reduce costs, not only through conventional means, such as simplifying designs and using cheaper materials, but also by changing the way cars are engineered. For example, engineers were pushed to combine functions into fewer parts and systems. Their aim: cut the number of components in a car by half.
In 2002, the plan morphed into the "2010 Vision," aiming for 15 per cent global market share by the early 2010s, an ambitious jump from the 10 per cent mark Toyota had at the time. Toyota has yet to achieve this goal. Its consolidated group market share rose to as high as about 13 per cent in 2008, according to CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that tracks automakers.
The effects of those measures were phenomenal. Starting around 2000, the company's global sales began growing by up to 600,000 vehicles a year, more than the annual overall volume achieved by Volvo.
During this 15-year non-family reign, Toyota achieved other milestones: operating profit margins zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6 per cent. In 2008, Toyota displaced GM as the world's biggest automaker by unit sales.
As part of his strategy, Mr Okuda sought to diminish the family's role. According to executives close to him, Mr Okuda said founding-family dominance was an outdated concept -- especially when the family controlled less than 2 per cent of the stock in the publicly traded company.
At the peak of his power, Mr Okuda publicly was frank about that belief. "The Toyoda family will eventually become a 'shrine' to the company's foundation, to which we will pay respect once a year," he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2000 interview.
Asked then about future prospects for Mr Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr Okuda said: "Nepotism just doesn't belong in our future." He elaborated: "Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes."
At the time, Mr Toyoda seemed to have been sidelined. When he was assigned to lead Toyota's Chinese operations in 2001, China was still a backwater in Toyota's global strategy. Mr Okuda, by then Toyota chairman, likened the job to "mopping the floors" -- a safe place for grooming a scion with more ambition than experience, according to a separate Journal interview in 2003.
But Mr Toyoda fixed the troubled Chinese subsidiary and put it on a path for growth. He was then promoted in 2005 to the position of executive vice-president, where he had broad responsibilities, including quality, product management, purchasing and global sales.
Even as he climbed the ladder, Mr Toyoda said little in top management meetings, according to some non-family executives. As Toyota made progress, the non-family executives began dismissing Mr Toyoda and treated him as a not-so-bright spoiled rich kid, say several non-family managers.
Executives close to Mr Toyoda dispute the notion that he was overpowered by top management. While the company's financial reports were improving, a number of vehicle recalls signalled that its famed quality was slipping, and Mr Toyoda began to sound the warning bell. On December 2, 2005, the end of the year when Mr Okuda's 10-year vision was coming to fruition, Mr Toyoda gave an unpublicized, internal speech questioning the new direction.
Talking to engineers and mid-level executives, Mr Toyoda said the rapid expansion exceeded the company's ability to assure the quality and reliability of each model. He called on the engineers, seated inside an auditorium at Toyota's global headquarters, to shift their mindset and attain the "resolve to make a big turn from emphasizing volume to quality," according to a summary of the speech reviewed by the Journal.
Top executives at the time say Mr Toyoda never took such complaints directly to them.
In 2008, the question of family versus non-family management came to a head as Mr Watanabe was preparing to retire as chief executive. Mr Okuda, then a board member, angled for a close aide, another non-family executive, to take the job. Shoichiro Toyoda, a former president who remained an influential adviser, weighed in for Akio, his son, according to senior Toyota executives.
In January 2009, the company announced Akio Toyoda would replace Mr Watanabe as president in June. Taking charge at 53 years old, Mr Toyoda became Toyota's youngest chief executive since his grandfather became president in 1941 at age 47.
The younger Mr Toyoda declared as one of his first priorities undoing many of his predecessor's policies. He began by signalling to underlings that he didn't share Mr Watanabe's informal goal of hitting two trillion yen or more in annual operating income. He immediately killed the "global profit management" plan, associates say.
The reality of Toyota's quality problems -- the main battleground inside the company today -- is a bit ambiguous.
Two separate surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates show the Toyota brand quality has actually improved over the past decade, measured by a decline in the rate of owner complaints. This occurred even as the number of vehicles the company recalled around the world skyrocketed in that time.
The surveys also show that Toyota rivals improved faster. In 2000, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus placed first in quality rankings for used-car owners, while the Toyota brand ranked fourth. By 2009, Lexus fell from the top spot, ranking behind Buick and Jaguar, while the Toyota brand again placed fourth. In quality rankings for new-car owners, the Toyota brand in 2000 tied with BMW for fourth. In 2009, Toyota ranked sixth.
Mr Toyoda's supporters blame the slippage in relative quality rankings -- as well as the sharp rise in recalls -- on the company's previous non-family managers. It takes two to three years to develop a new car, so the models experiencing problems were developed before Akio Toyoda took the helm last June.
The non-family executives acknowledge they made some mistakes. One says a large number of inexperienced contract engineers hired from outside agencies -- an effort to save money as they tried to boost engineering capacity -- led to at least some of the increase in quality glitches.
But the non-family managers blame Mr Toyoda's management style -- both external and internal -- as much as anything for letting the defects turn from a fixable problem into a full crisis.
Mr Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One non-family manager says the current executive structure operates like a "shadow management team," doubling up information and management.
In terms of handling the American public, politicians and the media, they say Mr Toyoda was slow to address publicly the controversy. And when he did finally speak out, they say, his statements were widely criticised as vague and halting.
Mr Toyoda's supporters say, on the contrary, he's been clear and direct about the direction he wants to follow. At a media conference last month, Mr Toyoda said the previous expansion push may have caused it to scrimp on quality, compromising its just-in-time production system, for example. "I would like to make sure we re-embrace those basics and rebuild the foundation of Toyota and its production system," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1225853591238
* Norihiko Shirouzu
* From: The Wall Street Journal
* April 14, 2010 12:11PM
TOYOTA Motor's quality crisis is exposing -- and exacerbating -- a long-simmering internal feud. The battle pits the founding Toyoda family against a group of professional managers, each blaming the other for the carmaker's woes.
Behind the scenes in recent weeks, the skirmishing has grown intense. President Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the founder, has tried to push out one of the non-family executives: his predecessor as president, Katsuaki Watanabe, now vice-chairman.
Not long after the company made one of its massive safety recalls in mid-January, Mr Toyoda suggested to Mr Watanabe, through an intermediary, that the former president leave the auto giant and instead run a Toyota affiliate, according to an executive who says he was told about the move by Mr Toyoda.
Mr Watanabe refused.
The standoff, which hasn't been reported before, is a dramatic example of how the old split between the two camps is bubbling to the surface amid Toyota's crisis. The feud is a distraction for a divided leadership as officials struggle to regain their footing after three months of attacks unprecedented in the company's 75-year history.
Mr Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by non-family predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.
The problems arose when "some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit," Mr Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. He acknowledged the "ultimate responsibility for mistakes... lies in me".
A week earlier, Jim Press -- once the top Toyota executive in the US before he jumped to a rival automaker -- issued a statement declaring: "The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates."
Those executives "didn't have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does," said Mr Press, who had a run-in with non-family Japanese bosses several years ago.
A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on the infighting, saying: "We do not discuss executive changes unless they are formally decided." She declined to comment on the statements by Messrs Toyoda and Press, or to make Mr Watanabe available for comment.
(In the latest problem for the company, Toyota announced today it was temporarily suspending sales of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 after a safety warning by a respected US consumer magazine, AFP news agency reported. Consumer Reports gave the sports utility vehicle a rare "Don't Buy: Safety Risk" rating after conducting tests on the car. In response, Toyota said it had asked its dealers to "temporarily suspend sales of the 2010 GX 460" in the US, but insisted it was "confident that the GX meets our high safety standards.")
Privately, the non-family managers have been waging their own campaign within the Toyota group. They say Mr Toyoda never publicly opposed their profit-growth strategy when the company was widely praised for making big money and surpassing General Motors to become the world's No.1 carmaker. They say Toyota's current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr Toyoda's making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn't ready to run a global corporation.
"Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?" one of Mr Watanabe's top aides said. "One of our biggest social responsibilities is to generate profits and pay taxes. To criticise the company's effort to maximise profits and thus taxes is just complete nonsense."
Hiroshi Okuda, a non-family president who ran the company from 1995 through 1999, has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: "Akio needs to go." The 77-year-old remains a key company adviser even though he gave up his board seat last year.
Toyota declined to make Mr Okuda available for comment. The Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment.
Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor of economics at Tokyo University who has studied Toyota extensively, says airing problems openly is very much part of Toyota's corporate culture focused on kaizen, or continuous improvement. "But it's highly unusual for anybody inside Toyota to publicly criticise certain individuals by name," or to criticise in a way that it's easy for anybody to identify the targets.
The feud dates to the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. Non-Toyodas also ran the company from 1950-67.
By the time Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down as president in 1995, after a stroke, the company was losing market share and risked posting its first loss since 1950. It was vulnerable to a weak Japanese economy, trade friction with the US, and a strong Japanese currency that crimped exports.
A series of non-Toyodas took the helm, beginning with Mr Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr Watanabe in 2009. During their terms, the company revived financially and emerged as one of the most admired and studied companies in the world.
The gist of the Okuda-Watanabe strategy was to take Toyota's globalisation efforts, launched under the previous generation of family management, to new levels. Even though the company had begun to build factories in the US and other markets in the 1980s, it still was seen as largely insular and Japan-focused.
In 1996, Mr Okuda and aides unveiled a new strategy dubbed the "2005 Vision." They aimed to retool the automaker over the coming decade, growing rapidly while relying less on exports and more on factories producing locally in target markets, from Argentina to Thailand to the US. Mr Watanabe was one of the authors of the plan.
To realise this 10-year vision, the executives devised interim "global master plans" to assign resources efficiently to different divisions, along with "global profit management" plans that required sales executives around the world to attain certain profitability goals.
The 2005 Vision also pushed Toyota to implement kakushin, or revolutionary innovations, in vehicle design and manufacturing. That included efficiency drives to reduce costs, not only through conventional means, such as simplifying designs and using cheaper materials, but also by changing the way cars are engineered. For example, engineers were pushed to combine functions into fewer parts and systems. Their aim: cut the number of components in a car by half.
In 2002, the plan morphed into the "2010 Vision," aiming for 15 per cent global market share by the early 2010s, an ambitious jump from the 10 per cent mark Toyota had at the time. Toyota has yet to achieve this goal. Its consolidated group market share rose to as high as about 13 per cent in 2008, according to CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that tracks automakers.
The effects of those measures were phenomenal. Starting around 2000, the company's global sales began growing by up to 600,000 vehicles a year, more than the annual overall volume achieved by Volvo.
During this 15-year non-family reign, Toyota achieved other milestones: operating profit margins zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6 per cent. In 2008, Toyota displaced GM as the world's biggest automaker by unit sales.
As part of his strategy, Mr Okuda sought to diminish the family's role. According to executives close to him, Mr Okuda said founding-family dominance was an outdated concept -- especially when the family controlled less than 2 per cent of the stock in the publicly traded company.
At the peak of his power, Mr Okuda publicly was frank about that belief. "The Toyoda family will eventually become a 'shrine' to the company's foundation, to which we will pay respect once a year," he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2000 interview.
Asked then about future prospects for Mr Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr Okuda said: "Nepotism just doesn't belong in our future." He elaborated: "Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes."
At the time, Mr Toyoda seemed to have been sidelined. When he was assigned to lead Toyota's Chinese operations in 2001, China was still a backwater in Toyota's global strategy. Mr Okuda, by then Toyota chairman, likened the job to "mopping the floors" -- a safe place for grooming a scion with more ambition than experience, according to a separate Journal interview in 2003.
But Mr Toyoda fixed the troubled Chinese subsidiary and put it on a path for growth. He was then promoted in 2005 to the position of executive vice-president, where he had broad responsibilities, including quality, product management, purchasing and global sales.
Even as he climbed the ladder, Mr Toyoda said little in top management meetings, according to some non-family executives. As Toyota made progress, the non-family executives began dismissing Mr Toyoda and treated him as a not-so-bright spoiled rich kid, say several non-family managers.
Executives close to Mr Toyoda dispute the notion that he was overpowered by top management. While the company's financial reports were improving, a number of vehicle recalls signalled that its famed quality was slipping, and Mr Toyoda began to sound the warning bell. On December 2, 2005, the end of the year when Mr Okuda's 10-year vision was coming to fruition, Mr Toyoda gave an unpublicized, internal speech questioning the new direction.
Talking to engineers and mid-level executives, Mr Toyoda said the rapid expansion exceeded the company's ability to assure the quality and reliability of each model. He called on the engineers, seated inside an auditorium at Toyota's global headquarters, to shift their mindset and attain the "resolve to make a big turn from emphasizing volume to quality," according to a summary of the speech reviewed by the Journal.
Top executives at the time say Mr Toyoda never took such complaints directly to them.
In 2008, the question of family versus non-family management came to a head as Mr Watanabe was preparing to retire as chief executive. Mr Okuda, then a board member, angled for a close aide, another non-family executive, to take the job. Shoichiro Toyoda, a former president who remained an influential adviser, weighed in for Akio, his son, according to senior Toyota executives.
In January 2009, the company announced Akio Toyoda would replace Mr Watanabe as president in June. Taking charge at 53 years old, Mr Toyoda became Toyota's youngest chief executive since his grandfather became president in 1941 at age 47.
The younger Mr Toyoda declared as one of his first priorities undoing many of his predecessor's policies. He began by signalling to underlings that he didn't share Mr Watanabe's informal goal of hitting two trillion yen or more in annual operating income. He immediately killed the "global profit management" plan, associates say.
The reality of Toyota's quality problems -- the main battleground inside the company today -- is a bit ambiguous.
Two separate surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates show the Toyota brand quality has actually improved over the past decade, measured by a decline in the rate of owner complaints. This occurred even as the number of vehicles the company recalled around the world skyrocketed in that time.
The surveys also show that Toyota rivals improved faster. In 2000, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus placed first in quality rankings for used-car owners, while the Toyota brand ranked fourth. By 2009, Lexus fell from the top spot, ranking behind Buick and Jaguar, while the Toyota brand again placed fourth. In quality rankings for new-car owners, the Toyota brand in 2000 tied with BMW for fourth. In 2009, Toyota ranked sixth.
Mr Toyoda's supporters blame the slippage in relative quality rankings -- as well as the sharp rise in recalls -- on the company's previous non-family managers. It takes two to three years to develop a new car, so the models experiencing problems were developed before Akio Toyoda took the helm last June.
The non-family executives acknowledge they made some mistakes. One says a large number of inexperienced contract engineers hired from outside agencies -- an effort to save money as they tried to boost engineering capacity -- led to at least some of the increase in quality glitches.
But the non-family managers blame Mr Toyoda's management style -- both external and internal -- as much as anything for letting the defects turn from a fixable problem into a full crisis.
Mr Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One non-family manager says the current executive structure operates like a "shadow management team," doubling up information and management.
In terms of handling the American public, politicians and the media, they say Mr Toyoda was slow to address publicly the controversy. And when he did finally speak out, they say, his statements were widely criticised as vague and halting.
Mr Toyoda's supporters say, on the contrary, he's been clear and direct about the direction he wants to follow. At a media conference last month, Mr Toyoda said the previous expansion push may have caused it to scrimp on quality, compromising its just-in-time production system, for example. "I would like to make sure we re-embrace those basics and rebuild the foundation of Toyota and its production system," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1225853591238
04-16-10, 09:06 AM
#186
Lexus Fanatic
The auto press, of course, puts a lot of pressure on automakers to install relatively ineffective, late-responding VSC (or VSC shut-off switches) so they can do tail-drifts and powerslides. I can understand the rationale for that when on a track, autocrossing, etc....in a sport-oriented vehicle it is suited for, but for a high-center-of-gravity vehicle like a GX, on a public road, that is quite a different matter.
04-16-10, 09:43 AM
#187
Lexus Fanatic
The auto press, of course, puts a lot of pressure on automakers to install relatively ineffective, late-responding VSC (or VSC shut-off switches) so they can do tail-drifts and powerslides. I can understand the rationale for that when on a track, autocrossing, etc....in a sport-oriented vehicle it is suited for, but for a high-center-of-gravity vehicle like a GX, on a public road, that is quite a different matter.
Therefore Toyota/Lexus will never claim this as an excuse for the poor handling behavior at the limit, as shown in the vid.
Last edited by IS-SV; 04-16-10 at 09:48 AM.
04-16-10, 09:55 AM
#188
The auto press (and what it recommends on sports cars via driver-selectable VSC control system settings) has nothing to do with the GX problem being discussed. Secondly, the auto press pushing for selectable VSC settings on sports cars and sports sedans, is mainly pressing for these driver-selectable options for track purposes because some of these cars are tracked on weekends by owners. My 07 IS350 has this driver-selectable feature, unlike the 06's.
Therefore Toyota/Lexus will never claim this as an excuse for the poor handling behavior at the limit, as shown in the vid.
Therefore Toyota/Lexus will never claim this as an excuse for the poor handling behavior at the limit, as shown in the vid.
04-16-10, 12:31 PM
#189
Lexus Fanatic
My 07 IS350 has this driver-selectable feature, unlike the 06's.
Therefore Toyota/Lexus will never claim this as an excuse for the poor handling behavior at the limit, as shown in the vid.
04-16-10, 12:38 PM
#190
Lexus Fanatic
No kidding, a properly working GX VSC would have prevented this, which has nothing to do with the press. None of the behavior exhibited in the video is considered to be desirable for a vehicle of this type. The fix has already been identified as a programming reflash, not a suspension change. So much for armchair internet non-technical speculation, the problem and fix have already been identified by Toyota/Lexus thankfully.
Last edited by IS-SV; 04-16-10 at 12:56 PM. Reason: sp
04-16-10, 12:55 PM
#191
Lexus Fanatic
We'll see. I owned a Lexus IS300 myself, once, and a factory ECU reflash didn't seem to help with a minor transmission-flare problem....or for flares/hesitation on the ES330. Nothing you or I can say right now will tell if this does for the GX either.
04-16-10, 12:58 PM
#192
Lexus Fanatic
, we've noticed btw) has nothing to do with the reflash of a VSC system. Note: testing in same mode as used by CR will take place by Toyota/Lexus.
04-16-10, 01:05 PM
#193
Lexus Fanatic
I didn't join CL yesterday. But car talk is not always a pattern...you deal with each subject as necessary.
Note: testing in same mode as used by CR will take place by Toyota/Lexus.
04-16-10, 01:10 PM
#194
Lexus Fanatic
04-17-10, 03:27 AM
#195
Lexus Fanatic
Join Date: Jan 2005
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Toyota crisis exposes internal feud
* Norihiko Shirouzu
* From: The Wall Street Journal
* April 14, 2010 12:11PM
TOYOTA Motor's quality crisis is exposing -- and exacerbating -- a long-simmering internal feud. The battle pits the founding Toyoda family against a group of professional managers, each blaming the other for the carmaker's woes.
Behind the scenes in recent weeks, the skirmishing has grown intense. President Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the founder, has tried to push out one of the non-family executives: his predecessor as president, Katsuaki Watanabe, now vice-chairman.
Not long after the company made one of its massive safety recalls in mid-January, Mr Toyoda suggested to Mr Watanabe, through an intermediary, that the former president leave the auto giant and instead run a Toyota affiliate, according to an executive who says he was told about the move by Mr Toyoda.
Mr Watanabe refused.
The standoff, which hasn't been reported before, is a dramatic example of how the old split between the two camps is bubbling to the surface amid Toyota's crisis. The feud is a distraction for a divided leadership as officials struggle to regain their footing after three months of attacks unprecedented in the company's 75-year history.
Mr Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by non-family predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.
The problems arose when "some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit," Mr Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. He acknowledged the "ultimate responsibility for mistakes... lies in me".
A week earlier, Jim Press -- once the top Toyota executive in the US before he jumped to a rival automaker -- issued a statement declaring: "The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates."
Those executives "didn't have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does," said Mr Press, who had a run-in with non-family Japanese bosses several years ago.
A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on the infighting, saying: "We do not discuss executive changes unless they are formally decided." She declined to comment on the statements by Messrs Toyoda and Press, or to make Mr Watanabe available for comment.
(In the latest problem for the company, Toyota announced today it was temporarily suspending sales of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 after a safety warning by a respected US consumer magazine, AFP news agency reported. Consumer Reports gave the sports utility vehicle a rare "Don't Buy: Safety Risk" rating after conducting tests on the car. In response, Toyota said it had asked its dealers to "temporarily suspend sales of the 2010 GX 460" in the US, but insisted it was "confident that the GX meets our high safety standards.")
Privately, the non-family managers have been waging their own campaign within the Toyota group. They say Mr Toyoda never publicly opposed their profit-growth strategy when the company was widely praised for making big money and surpassing General Motors to become the world's No.1 carmaker. They say Toyota's current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr Toyoda's making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn't ready to run a global corporation.
"Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?" one of Mr Watanabe's top aides said. "One of our biggest social responsibilities is to generate profits and pay taxes. To criticise the company's effort to maximise profits and thus taxes is just complete nonsense."
Hiroshi Okuda, a non-family president who ran the company from 1995 through 1999, has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: "Akio needs to go." The 77-year-old remains a key company adviser even though he gave up his board seat last year.
Toyota declined to make Mr Okuda available for comment. The Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment.
Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor of economics at Tokyo University who has studied Toyota extensively, says airing problems openly is very much part of Toyota's corporate culture focused on kaizen, or continuous improvement. "But it's highly unusual for anybody inside Toyota to publicly criticise certain individuals by name," or to criticise in a way that it's easy for anybody to identify the targets.
The feud dates to the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. Non-Toyodas also ran the company from 1950-67.
By the time Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down as president in 1995, after a stroke, the company was losing market share and risked posting its first loss since 1950. It was vulnerable to a weak Japanese economy, trade friction with the US, and a strong Japanese currency that crimped exports.
A series of non-Toyodas took the helm, beginning with Mr Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr Watanabe in 2009. During their terms, the company revived financially and emerged as one of the most admired and studied companies in the world.
The gist of the Okuda-Watanabe strategy was to take Toyota's globalisation efforts, launched under the previous generation of family management, to new levels. Even though the company had begun to build factories in the US and other markets in the 1980s, it still was seen as largely insular and Japan-focused.
In 1996, Mr Okuda and aides unveiled a new strategy dubbed the "2005 Vision." They aimed to retool the automaker over the coming decade, growing rapidly while relying less on exports and more on factories producing locally in target markets, from Argentina to Thailand to the US. Mr Watanabe was one of the authors of the plan.
To realise this 10-year vision, the executives devised interim "global master plans" to assign resources efficiently to different divisions, along with "global profit management" plans that required sales executives around the world to attain certain profitability goals.
The 2005 Vision also pushed Toyota to implement kakushin, or revolutionary innovations, in vehicle design and manufacturing. That included efficiency drives to reduce costs, not only through conventional means, such as simplifying designs and using cheaper materials, but also by changing the way cars are engineered. For example, engineers were pushed to combine functions into fewer parts and systems. Their aim: cut the number of components in a car by half.
In 2002, the plan morphed into the "2010 Vision," aiming for 15 per cent global market share by the early 2010s, an ambitious jump from the 10 per cent mark Toyota had at the time. Toyota has yet to achieve this goal. Its consolidated group market share rose to as high as about 13 per cent in 2008, according to CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that tracks automakers.
The effects of those measures were phenomenal. Starting around 2000, the company's global sales began growing by up to 600,000 vehicles a year, more than the annual overall volume achieved by Volvo.
During this 15-year non-family reign, Toyota achieved other milestones: operating profit margins zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6 per cent. In 2008, Toyota displaced GM as the world's biggest automaker by unit sales.
As part of his strategy, Mr Okuda sought to diminish the family's role. According to executives close to him, Mr Okuda said founding-family dominance was an outdated concept -- especially when the family controlled less than 2 per cent of the stock in the publicly traded company.
At the peak of his power, Mr Okuda publicly was frank about that belief. "The Toyoda family will eventually become a 'shrine' to the company's foundation, to which we will pay respect once a year," he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2000 interview.
Asked then about future prospects for Mr Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr Okuda said: "Nepotism just doesn't belong in our future." He elaborated: "Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes."
At the time, Mr Toyoda seemed to have been sidelined. When he was assigned to lead Toyota's Chinese operations in 2001, China was still a backwater in Toyota's global strategy. Mr Okuda, by then Toyota chairman, likened the job to "mopping the floors" -- a safe place for grooming a scion with more ambition than experience, according to a separate Journal interview in 2003.
But Mr Toyoda fixed the troubled Chinese subsidiary and put it on a path for growth. He was then promoted in 2005 to the position of executive vice-president, where he had broad responsibilities, including quality, product management, purchasing and global sales.
Even as he climbed the ladder, Mr Toyoda said little in top management meetings, according to some non-family executives. As Toyota made progress, the non-family executives began dismissing Mr Toyoda and treated him as a not-so-bright spoiled rich kid, say several non-family managers.
Executives close to Mr Toyoda dispute the notion that he was overpowered by top management. While the company's financial reports were improving, a number of vehicle recalls signalled that its famed quality was slipping, and Mr Toyoda began to sound the warning bell. On December 2, 2005, the end of the year when Mr Okuda's 10-year vision was coming to fruition, Mr Toyoda gave an unpublicized, internal speech questioning the new direction.
Talking to engineers and mid-level executives, Mr Toyoda said the rapid expansion exceeded the company's ability to assure the quality and reliability of each model. He called on the engineers, seated inside an auditorium at Toyota's global headquarters, to shift their mindset and attain the "resolve to make a big turn from emphasizing volume to quality," according to a summary of the speech reviewed by the Journal.
Top executives at the time say Mr Toyoda never took such complaints directly to them.
In 2008, the question of family versus non-family management came to a head as Mr Watanabe was preparing to retire as chief executive. Mr Okuda, then a board member, angled for a close aide, another non-family executive, to take the job. Shoichiro Toyoda, a former president who remained an influential adviser, weighed in for Akio, his son, according to senior Toyota executives.
In January 2009, the company announced Akio Toyoda would replace Mr Watanabe as president in June. Taking charge at 53 years old, Mr Toyoda became Toyota's youngest chief executive since his grandfather became president in 1941 at age 47.
The younger Mr Toyoda declared as one of his first priorities undoing many of his predecessor's policies. He began by signalling to underlings that he didn't share Mr Watanabe's informal goal of hitting two trillion yen or more in annual operating income. He immediately killed the "global profit management" plan, associates say.
The reality of Toyota's quality problems -- the main battleground inside the company today -- is a bit ambiguous.
Two separate surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates show the Toyota brand quality has actually improved over the past decade, measured by a decline in the rate of owner complaints. This occurred even as the number of vehicles the company recalled around the world skyrocketed in that time.
The surveys also show that Toyota rivals improved faster. In 2000, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus placed first in quality rankings for used-car owners, while the Toyota brand ranked fourth. By 2009, Lexus fell from the top spot, ranking behind Buick and Jaguar, while the Toyota brand again placed fourth. In quality rankings for new-car owners, the Toyota brand in 2000 tied with BMW for fourth. In 2009, Toyota ranked sixth.
Mr Toyoda's supporters blame the slippage in relative quality rankings -- as well as the sharp rise in recalls -- on the company's previous non-family managers. It takes two to three years to develop a new car, so the models experiencing problems were developed before Akio Toyoda took the helm last June.
The non-family executives acknowledge they made some mistakes. One says a large number of inexperienced contract engineers hired from outside agencies -- an effort to save money as they tried to boost engineering capacity -- led to at least some of the increase in quality glitches.
But the non-family managers blame Mr Toyoda's management style -- both external and internal -- as much as anything for letting the defects turn from a fixable problem into a full crisis.
Mr Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One non-family manager says the current executive structure operates like a "shadow management team," doubling up information and management.
In terms of handling the American public, politicians and the media, they say Mr Toyoda was slow to address publicly the controversy. And when he did finally speak out, they say, his statements were widely criticised as vague and halting.
Mr Toyoda's supporters say, on the contrary, he's been clear and direct about the direction he wants to follow. At a media conference last month, Mr Toyoda said the previous expansion push may have caused it to scrimp on quality, compromising its just-in-time production system, for example. "I would like to make sure we re-embrace those basics and rebuild the foundation of Toyota and its production system," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1225853591238
* Norihiko Shirouzu
* From: The Wall Street Journal
* April 14, 2010 12:11PM
TOYOTA Motor's quality crisis is exposing -- and exacerbating -- a long-simmering internal feud. The battle pits the founding Toyoda family against a group of professional managers, each blaming the other for the carmaker's woes.
Behind the scenes in recent weeks, the skirmishing has grown intense. President Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the founder, has tried to push out one of the non-family executives: his predecessor as president, Katsuaki Watanabe, now vice-chairman.
Not long after the company made one of its massive safety recalls in mid-January, Mr Toyoda suggested to Mr Watanabe, through an intermediary, that the former president leave the auto giant and instead run a Toyota affiliate, according to an executive who says he was told about the move by Mr Toyoda.
Mr Watanabe refused.
The standoff, which hasn't been reported before, is a dramatic example of how the old split between the two camps is bubbling to the surface amid Toyota's crisis. The feud is a distraction for a divided leadership as officials struggle to regain their footing after three months of attacks unprecedented in the company's 75-year history.
Mr Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by non-family predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.
The problems arose when "some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit," Mr Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. He acknowledged the "ultimate responsibility for mistakes... lies in me".
A week earlier, Jim Press -- once the top Toyota executive in the US before he jumped to a rival automaker -- issued a statement declaring: "The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates."
Those executives "didn't have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does," said Mr Press, who had a run-in with non-family Japanese bosses several years ago.
A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on the infighting, saying: "We do not discuss executive changes unless they are formally decided." She declined to comment on the statements by Messrs Toyoda and Press, or to make Mr Watanabe available for comment.
(In the latest problem for the company, Toyota announced today it was temporarily suspending sales of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 after a safety warning by a respected US consumer magazine, AFP news agency reported. Consumer Reports gave the sports utility vehicle a rare "Don't Buy: Safety Risk" rating after conducting tests on the car. In response, Toyota said it had asked its dealers to "temporarily suspend sales of the 2010 GX 460" in the US, but insisted it was "confident that the GX meets our high safety standards.")
Privately, the non-family managers have been waging their own campaign within the Toyota group. They say Mr Toyoda never publicly opposed their profit-growth strategy when the company was widely praised for making big money and surpassing General Motors to become the world's No.1 carmaker. They say Toyota's current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr Toyoda's making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn't ready to run a global corporation.
"Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?" one of Mr Watanabe's top aides said. "One of our biggest social responsibilities is to generate profits and pay taxes. To criticise the company's effort to maximise profits and thus taxes is just complete nonsense."
Hiroshi Okuda, a non-family president who ran the company from 1995 through 1999, has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: "Akio needs to go." The 77-year-old remains a key company adviser even though he gave up his board seat last year.
Toyota declined to make Mr Okuda available for comment. The Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment.
Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor of economics at Tokyo University who has studied Toyota extensively, says airing problems openly is very much part of Toyota's corporate culture focused on kaizen, or continuous improvement. "But it's highly unusual for anybody inside Toyota to publicly criticise certain individuals by name," or to criticise in a way that it's easy for anybody to identify the targets.
The feud dates to the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. Non-Toyodas also ran the company from 1950-67.
By the time Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down as president in 1995, after a stroke, the company was losing market share and risked posting its first loss since 1950. It was vulnerable to a weak Japanese economy, trade friction with the US, and a strong Japanese currency that crimped exports.
A series of non-Toyodas took the helm, beginning with Mr Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr Watanabe in 2009. During their terms, the company revived financially and emerged as one of the most admired and studied companies in the world.
The gist of the Okuda-Watanabe strategy was to take Toyota's globalisation efforts, launched under the previous generation of family management, to new levels. Even though the company had begun to build factories in the US and other markets in the 1980s, it still was seen as largely insular and Japan-focused.
In 1996, Mr Okuda and aides unveiled a new strategy dubbed the "2005 Vision." They aimed to retool the automaker over the coming decade, growing rapidly while relying less on exports and more on factories producing locally in target markets, from Argentina to Thailand to the US. Mr Watanabe was one of the authors of the plan.
To realise this 10-year vision, the executives devised interim "global master plans" to assign resources efficiently to different divisions, along with "global profit management" plans that required sales executives around the world to attain certain profitability goals.
The 2005 Vision also pushed Toyota to implement kakushin, or revolutionary innovations, in vehicle design and manufacturing. That included efficiency drives to reduce costs, not only through conventional means, such as simplifying designs and using cheaper materials, but also by changing the way cars are engineered. For example, engineers were pushed to combine functions into fewer parts and systems. Their aim: cut the number of components in a car by half.
In 2002, the plan morphed into the "2010 Vision," aiming for 15 per cent global market share by the early 2010s, an ambitious jump from the 10 per cent mark Toyota had at the time. Toyota has yet to achieve this goal. Its consolidated group market share rose to as high as about 13 per cent in 2008, according to CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that tracks automakers.
The effects of those measures were phenomenal. Starting around 2000, the company's global sales began growing by up to 600,000 vehicles a year, more than the annual overall volume achieved by Volvo.
During this 15-year non-family reign, Toyota achieved other milestones: operating profit margins zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6 per cent. In 2008, Toyota displaced GM as the world's biggest automaker by unit sales.
As part of his strategy, Mr Okuda sought to diminish the family's role. According to executives close to him, Mr Okuda said founding-family dominance was an outdated concept -- especially when the family controlled less than 2 per cent of the stock in the publicly traded company.
At the peak of his power, Mr Okuda publicly was frank about that belief. "The Toyoda family will eventually become a 'shrine' to the company's foundation, to which we will pay respect once a year," he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2000 interview.
Asked then about future prospects for Mr Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr Okuda said: "Nepotism just doesn't belong in our future." He elaborated: "Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes."
At the time, Mr Toyoda seemed to have been sidelined. When he was assigned to lead Toyota's Chinese operations in 2001, China was still a backwater in Toyota's global strategy. Mr Okuda, by then Toyota chairman, likened the job to "mopping the floors" -- a safe place for grooming a scion with more ambition than experience, according to a separate Journal interview in 2003.
But Mr Toyoda fixed the troubled Chinese subsidiary and put it on a path for growth. He was then promoted in 2005 to the position of executive vice-president, where he had broad responsibilities, including quality, product management, purchasing and global sales.
Even as he climbed the ladder, Mr Toyoda said little in top management meetings, according to some non-family executives. As Toyota made progress, the non-family executives began dismissing Mr Toyoda and treated him as a not-so-bright spoiled rich kid, say several non-family managers.
Executives close to Mr Toyoda dispute the notion that he was overpowered by top management. While the company's financial reports were improving, a number of vehicle recalls signalled that its famed quality was slipping, and Mr Toyoda began to sound the warning bell. On December 2, 2005, the end of the year when Mr Okuda's 10-year vision was coming to fruition, Mr Toyoda gave an unpublicized, internal speech questioning the new direction.
Talking to engineers and mid-level executives, Mr Toyoda said the rapid expansion exceeded the company's ability to assure the quality and reliability of each model. He called on the engineers, seated inside an auditorium at Toyota's global headquarters, to shift their mindset and attain the "resolve to make a big turn from emphasizing volume to quality," according to a summary of the speech reviewed by the Journal.
Top executives at the time say Mr Toyoda never took such complaints directly to them.
In 2008, the question of family versus non-family management came to a head as Mr Watanabe was preparing to retire as chief executive. Mr Okuda, then a board member, angled for a close aide, another non-family executive, to take the job. Shoichiro Toyoda, a former president who remained an influential adviser, weighed in for Akio, his son, according to senior Toyota executives.
In January 2009, the company announced Akio Toyoda would replace Mr Watanabe as president in June. Taking charge at 53 years old, Mr Toyoda became Toyota's youngest chief executive since his grandfather became president in 1941 at age 47.
The younger Mr Toyoda declared as one of his first priorities undoing many of his predecessor's policies. He began by signalling to underlings that he didn't share Mr Watanabe's informal goal of hitting two trillion yen or more in annual operating income. He immediately killed the "global profit management" plan, associates say.
The reality of Toyota's quality problems -- the main battleground inside the company today -- is a bit ambiguous.
Two separate surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates show the Toyota brand quality has actually improved over the past decade, measured by a decline in the rate of owner complaints. This occurred even as the number of vehicles the company recalled around the world skyrocketed in that time.
The surveys also show that Toyota rivals improved faster. In 2000, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus placed first in quality rankings for used-car owners, while the Toyota brand ranked fourth. By 2009, Lexus fell from the top spot, ranking behind Buick and Jaguar, while the Toyota brand again placed fourth. In quality rankings for new-car owners, the Toyota brand in 2000 tied with BMW for fourth. In 2009, Toyota ranked sixth.
Mr Toyoda's supporters blame the slippage in relative quality rankings -- as well as the sharp rise in recalls -- on the company's previous non-family managers. It takes two to three years to develop a new car, so the models experiencing problems were developed before Akio Toyoda took the helm last June.
The non-family executives acknowledge they made some mistakes. One says a large number of inexperienced contract engineers hired from outside agencies -- an effort to save money as they tried to boost engineering capacity -- led to at least some of the increase in quality glitches.
But the non-family managers blame Mr Toyoda's management style -- both external and internal -- as much as anything for letting the defects turn from a fixable problem into a full crisis.
Mr Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One non-family manager says the current executive structure operates like a "shadow management team," doubling up information and management.
In terms of handling the American public, politicians and the media, they say Mr Toyoda was slow to address publicly the controversy. And when he did finally speak out, they say, his statements were widely criticised as vague and halting.
Mr Toyoda's supporters say, on the contrary, he's been clear and direct about the direction he wants to follow. At a media conference last month, Mr Toyoda said the previous expansion push may have caused it to scrimp on quality, compromising its just-in-time production system, for example. "I would like to make sure we re-embrace those basics and rebuild the foundation of Toyota and its production system," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1225853591238
No, that is NOT one of Toyota's biggest social responsibilities, and it really never has been historically. I hope this guy gets booted out of the company.
Also if Watanabe refuses to leave the company after being requested to do so by Akio, I'm sure he won't refuse if the same request is made by Shoichiro Toyoda.
This is nothing but good news in my eyes. I hope Akio continues to do what he's doing, and that these profit-focused cost-cutters wield less influence within the company.