Produced by Tiger Sniffing Car Group
Author｜Hu Yang
QuestionFigure｜Nikkei
Toyota Akio officially took over Toyota Motor in July 2009. After fourteen years since 1995, the Toyota Empire once again welcomed a leader with the surname “Toyota”.
His great-grandfather started the family business, and his grandfather founded Toyota Motor. No one knows where Akio Toyoda will lead this huge ship.
However, what follows is not the “great government return” as the Japanese media called (The Tokugawa shogunate returned to the emperor in 1867, the beginning of modern Japanese history)< /span>, it’s more like Toyota’s “Emperor Guarding the Gate”: June to July 2009, Toyota’s “brake door” incident, which was a global sensation Simultaneous market fermentation. Just six months after taking office, on February 24, 2010, the 52-year-old Toyoda bowed to apologize at the Toyota “brake door” incident public hearing held by the US Congress.
(Annual sales of Lexus LS models in the United States)
Some people may have questions: What about the withered rear-wheel drive? Isn’t there still ES and LM that have hot price increases? Lexus has not been like a duck in China in recent years?
Actually, in the Chinese market, relying on the hot sales of ES and other front-wheel drive models and SUVs, Lexus has made great strides in recent years, but the North American market has been miserable. In terms of absolute sales, Lexus’ sales in the United States in 2015 set a record of 340,000 vehicles, and then dropped to less than 300,000 vehicles year by year. The horizontal contrast is even more amazing, 2010 -In the ten years of 2020, Lexus’ share of the US luxury car market has shrunk from 18.2% to 13%(Data: Edmunds) .
(2016-2018 saw a three-year decline in share, this figure is the share of the entire auto market; in 2011 it was due to brake doors)
The overall performance of Lexus in the past five years has basically depended on the export growth of the Chinese market, which will also offset some of the decline in sales in the US market. Although Lexus is a Japanese brand,The protection structure of the pool bag is not integrated into the body frame, and weight and space are wasted to a certain extent. The battery pack capacity of UX300e is 54.3kWh, and the NEDC endurance is 400km. Compared with the first-class pure electric vehicles on the market in 2020, this is certainly not enough to see.
Compared with the earlier pure-bred “oil-to-electricity” that was criticized in the early days, Toyota TNGA is after all a product of the electrification trend. Although pure electric power is not a key consideration, it has also been optimized to a certain extent. Therefore, the performance of these three Toyota/Lexus electric vehicles is certainly not as good as the purely 100% original electric platform, but they will not instantly fall into people’s bad impression of “oil-to-electricity”. Just Don’t confuse the pure electric “TNGA” with the e-TNGA pure electric platform that Toyota is working hard to develop.
(real e-TNGA, concept car)
According to Toyota’s plan announced in 2019, the e-TNGA platform specially developed for pure electricity will be put on the market in 2022-2024.
e-TNGA also has the high versatility of the TNGA architecture, and can be flexibly configured with front and rear axle motors to adapt to various body forms such as cars and SUVs. The battery pack is flat at the bottom like the rival’s electric platform. Toyota announced that the expected battery capacity is 50-100kWh, the battery life is 300-600km, and the two electric motors provided in advance are 80-150kW(single axis). Toyota has planned six global models for e-TNGA, and several partners Suzuki, Daihatsu and Subaru will also share the e-TNGA platform.
Born in the Toyota family, you are lucky and unfortunate. Fortunately, you are born with the Toyota surname, and you have a solid family background without worrying about higher education. Unfortunately, when you think about inheriting the family business directly, you find that your family only accounts for less than 1% of the shareholder list. Background allows you to easily have various resources to support, as long as you can be worthy of them as you grow up; but the advantages of surnames also end here. To gain a position in the family business founded by your ancestors, you still have to use strength Let foreign competitors convinced.
Toyota doesn’t really care about the fact that the person in power is surnamed “Toyota”. This allows Akio Toyoda to be more careful to balance the relationship between image and performance, and to compromise between ideals and reality. In the words of Akio Toyoda, “I may be fired at any time.”