Earlier this year, Toyota's Achio Toyoda made waves when he described his perception that his company was “in a sense of crisis”.
The boss of the world’s second-largest car company was in part steeling financial onlookers for substantially reduced profits – a pattern expected to continue for some time, due to rising costs and fluctuating exchange rates – but, more than that, he was signalling that the pace of change in the car industry presented the risk that today’s mega-brands could be next year’s IBM or Kodak.
On the last point, he might just as well have been talking about the Japanese car industry rather than just Toyota because, for all its historical might, there is a growing sense that it is only just awakening to the challenges presented by, among others, electrification, autonomy and connectivity – a fact likely to be borne out by the number of concepts looking at those three themes at this week’s Tokyo motor show.
2017 Tokyo motor show - full preview
But while there will be a temptation to celebrate these new ideas as showing off the very best of the Japanese car industry’s innovative – sometimes wacky – streak, the reality is that they are in fact exploring concepts that other car makers showed off long ago and, in some cases, already have in production.
Join the debate
Add your comment
@deputy
trust all that stuff to work seamlessly do you? all the time? look at the recall lists for the current - relatively far simpler - cars and see what you find. until we/they can make those work properly, automation is going to stuggle away from the test track and in mass production. a computer can crash without even leaving your table.
toyota in a cleft stick?
Toyota and a few others are caught between a rock and a hard place: they are trying to please some 'sensitive' law-makers by going 'electric' but at the same time, their bread-winners are the millions of conventional engines (diesel for a huge proportion) that they sell to low-tech countreis all over the world!
Autonomy: explain that to a guy stuck with a flat battery in the bush?
Connectivity: see above!
Electrification? Some places (many, many, many!) depend on a Honda or such generator (fuelled by petrol!) to power their radio sets in the middle of nowhere that can only be reached by large Toyota pick-ups with equally large diesel engines... The irony!
The trouble is that image is all-conquering these days!
What race?
And BMW were leading it 20 years ago with the 7 series, before dropping it in favour of the BEV.