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And just how committed Toyoda is
regarding having a more expressive
design was something that Katsuda
and his team learned frst-hand.
About a month before design
freeze, Toyoda looked at the fnal
design clay and wasn't satisfed,
Katsuda recalls. He thought that
the curvatures weren't as fully
formed and the edges weren't as
sharp as they should be in order
to achieve what he'd seen in the
sketches. While it was evident that
making the changes would have an
efect on the manufacturing and
stamping processes, Katsuda says
that Toyoda told him, "Challenge
engineering."
And so they set to it. "We had to
make changes to the vehicle even
though we felt that we had done
everything we could. But we were
very motivated by his drive to work
even harder. And it helped create a
feeling of 'One Team.'"
The Lexus RX crossover has been enormously popular since it
went on sale in March 1998. So when chief engineer Takayuki
Katsuda had to develop the fourth generation vehicle, he
had quite a challenge. Especially as he had to best the third
generation—for which he'd also been the chief engineer.
Year after year, sales leadership
notwithstanding, Lexus seemed
to lack the street cred that was
aforded to the German luxury
OEMs for their design (even
though one of the three has
spent the past several years being
consistently inconsistent in its
design approach).
Akio Toyoda, president and CEO
of Toyota Motor Corp., apparently
has had enough. He is pushing the
entire organization to come up
with more expressive designs.
While arguably the Toyota Produc-
tion System has emphasized manu-
facturing at the price of design
(e.g., minimizing the number of
hits that a part can have in order
to minimize takt time), Takayuki
Katsuda, chief engineer of the
2016 Lexus RX 350 and RX 450h,
explains that this is no longer
the case.