Member of Toyota’s founding family
Helped develop corporate philosophy
TOKYO — Eiji Toyoda, who as a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and an architect of its “lean manufacturing” method helped turn the automaker into a global powerhouse and changed the face of modern manufacturing, died Tuesday in Toyota City, Japan, where the company has its headquarters. He was 100.
Toyoda, a nephew of the Toyota Group founder, Sakichi Toyoda, was president of Toyota from 1967 to 1982 and continued as chairman and then as adviser until his death. In almost six decades with the company he helped transform a tiny spinoff of a textile loom maker into the world’s biggest automaker.
Early on he helped put Toyota at the forefront of a wave of automobile production in Japan, pushing it to bolster its lineup, first by adding compact vehicles and sports cars in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, he initiated the development of luxury models, culminating with the Lexus brand in 1989.
Toyoda also pushed Toyota’s expansion overseas, helping to establish the company’s joint factory with GM in Fremont, Calif. The plant introduced Japanese lean- production methods to the United States as part of a migration of Japanese auto manufacturing to American soil. The company’s manufacturing efficiencies have helped maintain Toyota’s status as one of the top auto manufacturers and employers in the world.
Toyoda was born on Sept. 12, 1913, in central Japan, the second son of Heikichi and Nao Toyoda. He spent much of his youth at his family’s textile mill and took an early interest in machines, he said in his 1988 autobiography, Toyota: Fifty Years in Motion. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1936 with a mechanical engineering degree and joined his family’s loom business.
Toyoda went on to oversee Toyota’s Motomachi plant, a huge undertaking that gave the automaker the capacity to produce 5,000 passenger vehicles a month at a time when all of Japan produced about 7,000 vehicles a month.
Even as he aggressively expanded production at Toyota, Toyoda applied a manufacturing culture based on concepts like “kaizen,” a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and just-intime production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a corporate philosophy known as the Toyota Production System, or Toyota Way.
Toyoda had three sons and a daughter with his wife, Kazuko. He is survived by Kanshiro, his eldest son.