Toyota Motor Corp. is plotting its future amid 1,631 acres (660 hectares) of rice paddies that date to the 17th century and cedar forests. Here, in central Japan’s Shimoyama village, a 30-minute drive from its Toyota City headquarters, the world’s biggest automaker plans a research center with at least 10 kilometers of road courses to fine-tune its vehicles.
President Akio Toyoda, who completed a 24-hour endurance race in May, says he wants to test new models.
“I plan to drive our cars,” Toyoda said in January. “I’d like to be a president who’s as close to the action as possible.”
Toyota’s push to get more hybrids and fuel-efficient cars on the road can’t come soon enough. Honda Motor Co. introduced its new Insight gasoline-electric model in February; it will sell a hybrid version of its Fit compact in the fiscal year starting in April 2010, earlier than originally planned.
“The market keeps changing,” says Akihiko Otsuka, chief engineer of Toyota’s newest Prius, which costs 2.05 million yen ($21,412) in Japan and gets 50 miles to the gallon. “Shortening the development period for hybrids especially is something that we’ve been told to do -- and it’s not just limited to hybrids.”
Fuel Economy
Test tracks closer to Toyota’s technical center in Toyota City would speed that goal, especially with suppliers nearby, says Andrew Phillips, an auto analyst at KBC Securities Japan.
Otsuka says the most challenging part of the four-and-a- half years Toyota worked on the latest Prius was the time spent on improving its 46-mpg fuel economy. Engineers first devoted every Monday to testing gasoline consumption. In the final year, they tested every day.
Toyota may do similar trials at the new facility as well as analyze safety and performance, Phillips says. Toyota won’t discuss the project. Officials in Aichi Prefecture, where Shimoyama is based, say they may break ground in April.
Toyota is flush with money for research. It held 5 trillion yen in cash and near-term securities as of March 31, according to Moody’s Investors Service. It shelled out 1.3 trillion yen for capital expenditures in the same year, trailing only Volkswagen AG’s 12.2 billion euros ($17.8 billion) and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG’s 19.4 billion euros in the year ended in December.
‘The Long View’
Toyota has spent 32 billion yen to buy land out of the project’s estimated cost of at least 100 billion yen, says Takayuki Tsunoda, an associate director at Aichi Prefecture’s Public Enterprise Bureau, which is handling the land development.
Toyota will keep spending to stay ahead of now bankrupt General Motors Corp. and fend off Honda, Phillips says.
“Toyota is taking the long view,” he says. “They’re thinking, How can we strengthen the competitiveness of the company?”
Toyota’s center for environmentally friendly cars will inflict damage on the environment, local activists say. They say construction will destroy the habitat of the gray-faced buzzard and oriental honey buzzard, both endangered in Aichi Prefecture. Toyota declines to comment.
In September, it scaled down the project by 32 percent. Even so, 691 acres will be deforested, rice paddies will be filled in and mountains bulldozed, Tsunoda says.
“Most people think of Toyota as an environmentally friendly company,” says Shigemi Oda, chairman of the Society to Consider the Large-Scale Development Project of the 21st Century. “Crushing mountains is environmentally destructive.”
For Akio Toyoda, Shimoyama may help broaden the appeal of Toyota’s brand as he navigates his challenges as president. “Over the next 100 years, I hope that cars will remain something that people will need,” Toyoda wrote in his racing blog. “We must make sure that that happens.”
Source: Bloomberg
No comments:
Post a Comment