Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Car Wars: Hyundai climbs with Toyota’s model
As a child in the early ’80s, I remember spending a summer in Seoul and taking a trip with relatives to the countryside in a Hyundai Pony, South Korea’s first homegrown car. I spoke no Korean, but learned one word quickly enough: “lemon”.
Hyundai Motor has certainly come a long way since then.
Thirty-four years after introducing the Pony hatchback at the Turin Motor Show, Hyundai is the world’s fourth-largest carmaker, surpassing Ford Motor in the first half of this year. With the rest of the industry reeling from slumping sales, Hyundai’s charge has been especially conspicuous this year as it grabbed market share across the world and even made record profits in the latest quarter.
As my colleague Cheon Jong-woo and I wrote last week, Hyundai’s rise is making Japanese rivals nervous.
While Hyundai’s mounting success, founded on offering quality products at cheaper prices, has been in the cards for a while now, there are two new factors that worry the Japanese: a strong yen, coupled with the new government’s apparent indifference towards it, and South Korea’s progress in sealing free trade pacts.
Where did all the cool cars go?
It was like a dream come true. I’d always wanted a Ford Mustang and there I was, cruising around Tokyo in the latest version of the iconic sports car with the 4.0 litre, V6 engine producing a powerful roar every time I accelerated.
I was able to adjust pretty quickly to the left-side steering wheel — Japanese steering wheels are always on the right — though I had a few embarrassing mix-ups between the directionals and the windshield wipers.
The last time I’d driven such a car was about 20 years ago, when I had a ’78 Chevy Camaro in my senior year of high school in Massachusetts.
Back then most kids in school wanted a car, and saved up from part-time jobs and went to driving school so they could get their license as soon as they were eligible – in my case the day I turned 16 and a half.
These days, however, a lot of young people seem to be more into electronics than cars, with vehicles just a tool to get them from point A to point B. It’s tough competing with all the PCs, cellphones and iPods out there. And money, of course, is a big factor as people cut spending in these low-octane economic times.
But I also wonder if cars nowadays are missing a bit of the cool factor.
As I’ve written previously, cars are simply a means to an end. Just a necessary evil that we have to endure a little longer. Just like horses were in the old west, trains, planes, houses, jobs, money, etc. – nothing more. Our lives are just a means to end as well.
Will “Toyoda Restoration” do the trick for Toyota?
Jan. 20 marked a new beginning for more than just Americans, who swore in Barack Obama as their first non-white president in history. It was a big day for the auto industry too: the dawn of a Fiat-Chrysler partnership, and the appointment of a founding family member to the top job at Toyota Motor Corp for the first time in 14 years.
The Toyota move, first flagged in Japanese media a month ago, has been highly sensationalized in Japan.
The local press has likened Akio Toyoda’s nomination to another turning point in Japanese history: the return of power to the imperial family in 1867 from the Tokugawa shogunate, which paved the way for the Meiji Restoration under Emperor Meiji.
“Taisei hokan”, as that historic event is called, has been in the Toyota history lexicon ever since Taizo Ishida somewhat reluctantly took the helm from founder Kiichiro Toyoda in 1950. That year, Kiichiro — Akio’s grandfather — was forced to step down to assuage an angry workforce over sackings that were imperative to saving Toyota from the brink of collapse. Ishida, whose devotion to the Toyoda family is said to have bordered on the religious, vowed to hand back the “throne” to Kiichiro once his duty of fixing the battered company was complete.
Alas, that promise would never come to pass, due to Kiichiro’s sudden death in 1952. It was only 15 years later that the torch returned to the family, with the appointment of Kiichiro’s trusted cousin and apprentice, Eiji Toyoda.
The top job then stayed in the family until 1995, when Tatsuro Toyoda succumbed to illness. His replacement was Hiroshi Okuda, a “numbers guy” whose own father was a stockbroker. That marked the dawn of a new era of management in an industry that found itself steeped in mergers, acquisitions and capital tie-ups formed to survive in what had become a far more competitive world.
