Akio Toyoda, the outgoing President of Toyota Motor, has some accomplishments after more than 13 years at the helm of the automaker. The founder’s grandson steered the company through the shoals of the global financial crisis, the major recalls in America, the floods in Thailand, the tsunami in Japan and the COVID pandemic. The crises have made the company stronger. Toyota is again firmly established ahead of Volkswagen as the world’s largest automaker. It is Japan’s most valuable publicly traded company by a wide margin. In the past fiscal year, the automaker made a profit equivalent to almost 22 billion euros, far more than the competition.
However, the change at the top raises a nagging question that has plagued investors for some time. Did Toyota oversleep the development towards the battery electric car? Or is Toyoda’s strategy of approaching the change in drive technology more slowly and keeping options open to customers for many years to come is the more successful path in the long run?