Toyota and Lexus recently held a meeting to explain to chosen guests from the Southeast Asia Region what they saw of the future, what their visions were, and what they were doing about it all. While this went on, by the way, different regions of the world were getting the similar discussion. The bigger the world is becoming, it seems Toyota believes the more they need to focus on the smaller as a way to move everyone forward.
This was in connection with planning for what has been renamed the Japan Mobility Show, or what used to be named the Tokyo Motor Show. An excellent way to see how the large and global group was handling all the changes in the world, automotive and otherwise.
Amid all the change, the company has remained rather steadfast to their visions. They believe they are a truly global company in the sense that they have really no one primary market. What they have is many markets all of which have their own specific needs and challenges and opportunities.
Their answer has been and will continue to be, many answers. And the answers aren’t just about cars, or propulsion, or driving aids, or how smart a car is. That is why, even before the world moves, supposedly, towards an electric mobility scenario, Toyota and Lexus have and continue to look to a plethora of solution and mixes.
This isn’t just the “electric or not” question, this is going deeper into what the different people in the different markets and indeed micro-markets with the different infrastructures and buying habits and financial abilities and government help or hindrance actually need and want.
They are looking at multiple end goals. How will people move and why? How can we make that movement less harmful to people and the environment? This all includes not just selling people cars you plug in, but also how to give them better options when they can’t.
An interesting picture they presented, broken down by markets, showed that older vehicles proved to produce the most harmful effects to the environment, affecting much more than their physical percentage of the market. This is particularly important in countries that, by an arcane set of rules, try to control traffic by creating situations that encourage people to have more cars and keep older cars on the road.
If the goal is to make the environment “better” while still improving the mobility of people and products on both community and personal levels, Toyota pointed out that there are several ways to do this. All of which can provide improvements. There may not be one way, or two ways. The answers may lie in combinations of advances, from moving more people to community transportation by providing first and last mile solutions to making specific improvements to the vehicles available to specific and highly individual markets.
And the name change. The Tokyo Motor Show became the Japan Mobility Show. When we began testing automated driving system years ago, we saw that while many of the western solutions were car-centric, the path Toyota and Lexus took was more community-based. More interactive with others whether private cars or government infrastructure or other companies. The change from Tokyo to Japan in the name perhaps shows that they feel they need to work more together than ever to be able to answer needs that are becoming more individual than ever.
