A small diorama in a Toyota City museum in Japan depicts an often-told story within Toyota Motor Corp. On the left is a disabled truck on a country road. On the right is a single figure about the size of a tin soldier.
Shown in full flight and headed toward the broken-down vehicle, the figure represents Kiichiro Toyoda, the auto maker’s founder. According to the tale, Toyoda learned one of his products had failed and rushed to the scene to personally oversee the repair.
This story is being replayed today on a global scale as the world’s largest auto maker struggles to repair its relationship with consumers. Toyota vehicles once revered as the pinnacle of technological achievement now are viewed with skepticism or outright scorn following a wave of quality lapses.
Enter Akio Toyoda, Kiichiro’s grandson, who took charge of the auto maker last year.
“As early as possible, we would like to restore this trust, confidence placed by the customers in us,” he tells a small group of journalists recently given unprecedented access to Toyota test sites in Japan.
“For the past year, I was leading the whole company in apology. In my second year, I want to be a leader who can express the gratitude on behalf of the company.
“We are most concerned about the fact that we would like to build a better car,” Toyoda adds. “That’s how we started. We wanted to build a better car.”
A newly created quality-control organization is a critical tool in this process. And a key feature of the organization is its decentralized structure.
North America, Asia, China and Europe each have a chief quality officer with unfettered access to the top of the house.
“If I don’t like the way (an investigation) is going, I have a direct line to Akio Toyoda,” says Toyota North America’s Chief Quality Officer Steve St Angelo. “Everybody knows that, so they try their best to make a good consensus at a lower level.”
Since the new organization was established, Toyota has issued eight U.S. safety recalls to address issues ranging from possible fuel leakage to potential corrosion in vehicles sold in regions subject to harsh winters.
