Toyota to launch new cars with bolder , stronger & more venturesome designs
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, 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 as many as 100 executives.
But the engineers will be under pressure to cut costs by using standard parts across different models, 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 craft 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-ever loss, 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 an even deeper-rooted issue: 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.
Source - economictimes.indiatimes.com
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