Boastful Toyota Exec Feels Little Sympathy For Foolish Rivals

If only other automakers were as sensible and wise as Toyota. If those companies held Toyota’s Magic 8 Ball, conjuring up all the right answers in the little purple window, they wouldn’t be so hasty to embark on risky ventures.

That’s the view of Toyota’s executive vice president, who’s apparently feeling pretty pleased with himself and his company. Didier Leroy broke from the automaker’s staid, stay-the-course-and-don’t-ruffle-feathers attitude at the Tokyo Motor Show this week, describing his rivals’ faults at a dinner held on the show’s sidelines.

Plunge headlong into electric vehicles? Sure, make wild long-term promises to customers, Leroy said. Toyota doesn’t do that. It just hands you a real car when it’s ready. Oh, and those diesels everyone’s worried about? Toyota fell out of love with them long before the word “dieselgate” left anyone’s lips.

Toyota’s feeling its oats.

While the automaker regularly appears atop the list of the world’s largest automakers, Leroy doesn’t feel there’s much point in chasing volume just for the sake of holding the top podium. Let Volkswagen or Renault-Nissan chase the glory, he feels, as just being big doesn’t keep customers coming back.

“Toyota could buy another one, two or three companies to be the world’s No.1 automaker again, but chasing volume for the sake of being No.1 is pointless,” said Leroy, as reported by Automotive News. “Toyota had consistently sold over 10 million units a year, so we have scale. And customers buy products and brands, not a position in the automaker ranking.”

In a world where practically every automaker, save for perhaps Mazda, promises a lineup of electric vehicles (ones you’ll surely want to buy) by a randomly selected date in the tantalizingly near future, that just isn’t Toyota’s style, Leroy claims.

“When will Toyota launch its first full EV? It will come and you’ll see it when it’s ready,” Leroy said. “While other automakers circulate detailed PowerPoints of their far future product plans, we unveil a new product only when it’s ready, so our customers can buy it and our dealers can sell it.”

Note the repeated use of the word “product,” which Toyota sees as the opposite of the word “promise.” Getting sassy, Leroy then named names.

“At Toyota, we aim for profitable growth, so selling an EV and losing $10,000 per unit as Tesla does is not a sound business model in our view.”

Ouch. We expect a harshly worded rebuttal from Elon Musk any minute now, just as soon as he’s done chewing out Consumer Reports. On the topic of EV sales, Leroy said that in Europe, besides France, Norway and Germany, EV sales “are basically zero. Zero!“

As for diesels, the automaker long ago decided to stop development of its own oil-burners. Unlike most of its overseas competitors, the subcompact C-HR crossover is only offered with gasoline engines. Six years ago, Leroy said, Toyota signed a contract with BMW to supply its European lineup with diesels, rather than go it alone.

“By the way, at that time, 40 percent of our European sales were diesels, now they are 15 percent,” he said.

Automakers in as strong a position as Toyota can afford to break character once in awhile and enjoy their standing, though hubris is an ever-present danger. That seemed like the case when Toyota boasted of the upcoming 2018 Camry’s predicted sales prowess. Did the revamped sedan re-energize the declining midsize car segment like Toyota predicted? No, but the new Camry did carve out a larger chunk of that market for itself, which, to an automaker, is what really matters.

Like a washed-up celebrity was once fond of saying — winning.

[Image: Toyota]