Behind Toyota's hybrid revolution ... SF Chronicle 4/24/2006

[Coastie for Truth]

Cross posted from




Satoshi Ogiso doesn't look or act like a brash automobile executive. With an ill-fitting suit and spiky hairdo, his hands flutter bashfully across his face as he talks of "difficulties," "challenges" and "problems." The 45-year-old engineer refuses to brag about his accomplishments. But as chief engineer of the hybrid Prius, Ogiso has helped Toyota revolutionize the auto industry.

By making huge long-term investments in gas-saving technologies that U.S. automakers pooh-poohed, Toyota has proved that corporate environmental consciousness can be wildly profitable.

"What has made this revolution possible is that Toyota is a company with a focus on technology, because we think innovation is the future of our company," Ogiso said in an interview. "So we cannot fall behind. We are trying very hard, and it is very difficult."

Ogiso's humility is typical of Toyota. Its world headquarters in Toyota City, a quiet industrial city 150 miles southwest of Tokyo, has a deceptively modest demeanor: The nondescript, 13-story building looks like it might house a midsize insurance firm in any American suburb.



Personal observation from the corner of Woodward Avenue and Maple Road in Birmingham MI --- Satoshi Ogiso would have been "RIFed" or "Surplused" out of GM, Ford, or DaimlerChrysler within three years of hire -- and would have ended up teaching Automotive Engineering 101 at

[NNadir]

1. I love this part:

The insistence on fuel efficiency was highly unusual. At the time, the price of oil averaged below $15 per barrel, Americans were snapping up ever-bigger SUVs, and saving gasoline seemed like a politically correct anachronism.

But Toyota's chairman convinced his top executives that environmental issues were a long-term threat, said Takehisa Yaegashi, a chief of the Prius project in the mid- and late 1990s who later became chief of all Toyota alternative power-train projects.

It's called "vision."

[Coastie for Truth]

2. Missing in Motown

In fact, it is decidedly "career disenhancing" in Bean Counter Detroit.