Shoichiro Toyoda, Japanese business executive, 1925 — 2023

Shoichiro Toyoda speaks during an interview in 1981 © The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images In his first overseas business trip to the US in the late 1950s, Shoichiro Toyoda made one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Toyoda, then aged 32, gave the green light for Toyota to export its first passenger vehicle, Crown, to America — only to be inundated with customer complaints that the engine was not powerful enough to drive on US highways. “It was a big failure,” Toyoda wrote in his 2015 book Believe in the Future, Step by Step . “But I took away an important lesson and continued my challenge to develop a high-quality passenger vehicle that would perform well anywhere in the world.” That challenge took one of Japan’s last great postwar industrialists through the height of the 1980s trade tensions between Washington and Tokyo, the bursting of Japan’s property and stock market bubble and the 1990s banking crisis that dragged the nation into a long period of stagnation. Toyoda, left, inspects a production line of light trucks at a plant in Taiwan in 1988 © Yang Chi-hsien/AP Toyoda, who has died aged 97, navigated these events with a determined focus on […]

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