Toyota Design: A smile says it all

Takuo Fukuichi

See also:
The philosophy of Toyota design
The five processes of Toyota design
The voices of Toyota design
Toyota Design: being a designer
Toyota Design: beauty, art and design
Toyota Design: a decade of awards 

In years gone by, Toyota took a committee-based approach to car design in an attempt to please more of the people more of the time. While that was logical at the time and led to strong sales figures, we now realise that it often produced innocuous, overly conservative designs that possibly failed to captivate car-buyers’ hearts.

Now, with a clear directive from president Akio Toyoda to try and ‘design outside of the box’, we are seeing Toyota producing cars and concepts with distinct and appealing characters – cars that make their owners smile.

To further explain this more emotive approach to design within Toyota, we talked to Tokuo Fukuichi, Chief Officer and Design Chief Senior Managing Officer, just before he was promoted to lead sister brand Lexus. Hear what he had to say in our video below.

Read more: Toyota FT-1 concept
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4 comments

    1. Hi Mr O’Connor
      Just to let you know the video is now embedded and working all ok. Thanks for your patience with this.

  1. Thank you for your post Mr Connor and bringing this to our attention.
    We have passed on the details and we are investigating this at the moment. I will send a further reply as soon as this is up and running.
    Thanks again.

  2. Hello Mr Connor
    We do apologise but we have had further problems with this video. Ot could be another day before this is up and running.

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