The world's longest, toughest test drive

SALTA, Argentina -- When the dust-encrusted convoy of Toyota trucks finally pulled into town after a day of off-roading Dakar Rally-style through dry riverbeds, drivers got an earful.

Stopping at dealerships is part and parcel for their three-and-a-half-month trans-continental cavalcade. And so is hearing from customers about Toyota products, both the good and bad.

At Autolux SA, the only Toyota store in this town nestled in the foothills of the Andes, the visiting Japanese motorcade members crowded around as customers imparted their experiences with the popular Hilux pickup sold in emerging markets.

But it was the criticism that fired the greatest interest.

Standing in the Autolux service bay, the Toyota technicians scrupulously scribbled every word on clipboards and notepads. They barraged the customers with follow-up questions.

And they snapped away at the customers' vehicles from every angle to take home photographic evidence.

"I will do my best to address the problem you raised when I return to Japan," one pledged.

Then they were off again on their radical road trip. Destination: the arid mountaintop salt plains hovering 13,000 feet above in the red-rocked ridges that ring the city, pushing through thin air that punishes both man and machine.

For the crew of Toyota engineers, product planners and sales managers, this trek is the ultimate expression of Toyota Motor Corp.'s seemingly nebulous quest for "ever-better cars."

Their mission: Drive and survive some of earth's most punishing roads, then return to their r&d labs and office cubicles to channel that experience into the next generation of vehicles.

Welcome to the Five Continents Drive. It is an unprecedented seven-year, 130,000-mile, worldwide gambit, devised by CEO Akio Toyoda himself to reboot the mindset of the world's biggest carmaker for an era of new markets, new technologies and new demands.

The goal: Ingrain the "ever-better" mindset across the carmaker's far-flung empire.

Akio Toyoda has intoned about making "ever-better cars" since first using the term publicly June 25, 2009, two days after taking charge of the company founded by his grandfather. Today, no Toyota speech, press conference or news release is complete without a mention.

Now, seven years later, Toyota is about to find out whether the mantra took hold or is just a hollow buzzword. The first wave of vehicles developed from scratch under Toyoda's watch are hitting the market. And the stakes couldn't be higher, with nameplates such as the stalwart Toyota Camry, sporty Lexus LC halo coupe and crucial Toyota C-HR subcompact crossover among them.

They will be the first test of whether Toyota is making cars not only better than the company's previous generation but also better and more exciting than the best that rivals have on offer.

The jury is still out on Akio-era product. The fourth-generation Prius was the lead-off vehicle for the new crop, conceived to ride on a new modular platform dubbed the Toyota New Global Architecture. By many measures, it marks a dramatic improvement over its predecessor. But U.S. customers, at least, don't seem convinced. U.S. Prius sales are down 12 percent its first year.

"Comparing it to the old Prius, it's a huge improvement," said Jake Fisher, who as director of auto testing at Consumer Reports evaluates some 70 vehicles a year. "But does it compare with the best of other automakers in terms of ride and handling? Not by a long shot."

In Toyota's view, good cars come from good people.

And few projects underscore Toyoda's push to transform the hidebound corporate culture of Toyota -- one of the most Japanese of Japanese companies -- more than the Five Continents Drive.

"We are doing this sort of thing to provide our employees the opportunity and experience to make ever-better cars," Toyoda said in an interview of the multiyear, multicontinent undertaking. "In making ever-better cars, it all comes down to the people."

The idea: Give everyone from bean counters to sales geeks -- not just the professional test drivers -- time behind the wheel on some of the world's wildest roads. It is a living manifestation of the Toyota maxim genchi genbutsu, Japanese for "go to the source, see for yourself."

For employees to feel each bump and curve in the seat of their pants will teach them more about making good cars than twice as many hours cruising a cushy proving ground, the thinking goes.

Each year, teams of Toyota drivers tick off a different landmass. Australia was first in 2014, North America came next. This year it was South America's turn, and Automotive News had an exclusive front row seat as the first automotive publication to embed with the cavalcade. 

When the convoy crosses the finish line in Japan in 2020, arriving just in time for the Toyota-sponsored Tokyo Summer Olympics, some 1,000 employees worldwide will have taken a turn in the driver's seat -- hopefully encountering something eye-opening and inspirational. 

"It was a very scary experience," recounts Shigeki Tomoyama, a senior managing officer who logged 250 miles across Brazil with the Five Continents team in September. 

Much of his drive was spent on undulating, one-lane roads stuck behind lumbering tractor-trailers loaded with sugar cane. Team members had no choice but to continually pass the trucks, a daunting task for any driver used to the orderly, impeccably manicured highways of Japan. 

"It was totally different there," Tomoyama says, noting that one of the convoy's Toyota nameplates -- he declined to name which -- didn't pack the proper punch for passing. 

"I was very anxious," Tomoyama says. "But these are the conditions locals face every day."

When Tomoyama returned to Japan, he relayed to Akio how nerve-wracking the driving was.

"He said, "It is important to feel that. That fear you experienced will help drive you to create ever-better cars. As long as you drive on a test course, you never feel that,'" Tomoyama says.

Drive participants are encouraged to ruminate philosophically about a range of questions:

• What do we mean when we say, "The roads shape us"? 
• What is it about a car that makes someone think, "Wow!"? 
• What kind of cars do people around the world truly want? 
• What is a car? 

Indeed, when Toyoda first dropped the catchphrase "ever-better cars," it elicited not only dismissive smirks from the media but blank stares from nearly everyone inside Toyota.

Steve St. Angelo, Toyota's regional CEO for Latin America and Caribbean, recalls that the first time he heard it, "I thought it was a translation problem." 

In the old Toyota, sales targets, vehicle specifications, crash tests, fuel economy regulation and cost ceilings were the concrete benchmarks that determined what a better product should be. 

But Toyoda, who eschews talking numbers, wanted to jettison old strictures. In challenging employees to build "ever-better cars," he intentionally refused to define what one is. 

As St. Angelo soon discovered, however, there was a method behind the apparent madness. 

"He purposefully doesn't tell us what an ever-better car is so you can get your own mind going. And you can think about it," he says. "I don't know how he comes up with stuff like this." 

What has mushroomed after years of hammering the mantra, insiders say, is a kind of companywide conversation about what makes a better car and how it can be achieved. 

"This is a completely different logic and a completely different strategy," Executive Vice President Didier Leroy says. "It's a big change within the organization."

Yet one inevitable outcome has been that employees have varying visions of "ever-better cars."

Leroy, Toyota's new global chief competitive officer, points to design as something already "ever-better." He points to the more aggressive grille styling and emotional body work of Lexus and the sportier stance and edgier looks of newer Toyotas such as the Prius and C-HR.

In Japan, which Leroy oversees as part of his portfolio of mature markets including the United States and Europe, Toyota is even pursuing an "ever-better dealer" campaign, he notes.

For Tomoyama, his ever-better ideal is born from a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am.

"When I was a college student, I used to watch "Knight Rider,'" Tomoyama says of the "80s kitsch TV classic starring David Hasselhoff and his crime-fighting, artificially intelligent car KITT.

"It inspired me to join Toyota because I wanted to create that kind of vehicle," Tomoyama says. "That was my view of the future of cars. That's the reason I joined Toyota."

Today, Tomoyama sits at the nexus of ever-better car creation inside Toyota.

As the head of Toyota's newly created Connected Company, which handles connected cars, and deputy director of motorsports, he oversees areas that dovetail into advanced technology.

"The Connected Company contributes to creating new value for vehicles, while motorsports improve upon the inherent current value of vehicles," says Tomoyama, who commutes to work in his prized 1997 Supra sports car, replete with a modified turbocharger that delivers 600 hp.

"Both go hand in hand, and, when unified, create ever-better cars," he said.

Another Five Continents Drive veteran is changing his view on obsessive cost control.

Kentaro Miyazaki develops sales strategy for Japan-market rental and lease operations. But in August, he found himself driving through the Brazilian jungle for two weeks.

"At that time, my only focus was on the price of the vehicle," Miyazaki says. "In meetings with technical or engineering people, they would make proposals about equipping a car with this or that equipment. But I only thought about how much that would increase the price."

After two weeks behind the wheel, from sunrise to sunset every day on unforgiving foreign roads, Miyazaki says he now sees things more from the engineers' perspective.

"They thought about the customers, what kind of issues or problems they have with vehicles," he said. "That's when I changed my idea about ever-better cars."

Such epiphanies are exactly what Akio Toyoda wanted.

"We are doing Five Continents to give employees firsthand experience," Toyoda said. "There is a bumpy section on a test course, but it normally lasts for only about 20 seconds. But on real roads, you'd have to drive on bumpy roads for two days. That makes a difference."

As scion of the founding family, Toyoda is steeped in genchi genbutsu.

One of young Akio's first assignments was streamlining truck deliveries to plants in Japan. He and a team member initially tailed the trucks in a separate vehicle to evaluate the routes.

But at a stoplight, Akio suddenly pulled the car over, jumped out, climbed into the truck cab and plunked himself down next to the flustered teamster.

"We can only resolve the trouble with the trucking when I'm actually inside the trucks and seeing the situation myself," the future CEO told his then-partner.

The Five Continents Drive is a celebration of such obsession.

At the end of every day, team members must report online, sharing their impressions, lessons learned and ideas for improvement. They support their findings with uploads of photos, video and other data collected from the field. The reports are coalesced and shared internally at Toyota as a kind of rolling database of feedback on the world's roads.

They return to Japan as proselytizers, giving internal presentations on their learnings.

During the leg through the Argentina Andes in late November, drivers paid close attention to the engines' performance climbing high into the Andes and to the braking coming back down.

Toyota's employees are looking to see how cars perform under a vast array of conditions completely foreign to them as engineers, product planners and marketers back in Japan.

They endure air filter-choking dust, window-rattling crosswinds, engine-baking heat, bone-numbing cold, combustion-snuffing rarefied mountain air. The works.

Interacting directly with foreign customers is another eye-opener. The Hilux drivers, for example, universally hailed the pickup for its stellar engine, indomitable durability and thrifty fuel economy. But they weren't shy about pet peeves.

One owner, who works in mining and has 17 of the pickups, complained of brake vibration in some and salt corrosion to the undercarriage. Another, who is a farmer, said the suspension was too stiff. A third, who grows tobacco and raises cattle, said he wished the fuel tank were bigger so that the Hilux could deliver longer a range between rural Argentina's far-flung towns.

The Toyota team members were keenly interested, saying that hearing such feedback is key to making ever-better cars.

"First and foremost, it's important to make better cars," said Takemitsu Iwata, the Toyota general manager who leads the Five Continents Drive under the wing of Toyota Gazoo Racing, the carmaker's global motorsports unit. "But it is equally important to make better people. This is a necessary investment to change the mindset of our people."

Critics say the exercise would be more insightful if Toyota included competitors' vehicles in the convoy, for side-by-side comparison, or if the vehicles were kitted with more high-tech instrumentation to capture detailed data. 

But the Five Continents Drive is a spiritual quest for the soul of Toyota in a changing world, not just an empirical analysis. 

Old-school notions of a better car are under assault in a rapidly changing industry. Electric cars, autonomous cars and connected cars are pressuring traditional players such as Toyota. Meanwhile, new entrants ranging from Tesla Motors and upstart Chinese wannabes to high-tech interlopers such as Google and Apple could transform the landscape in unforeseen ways. 

"In this kind of fast-moving world, nobody can say we are protected," Leroy says. "We have to find another way to make sure we are not just one, but two, steps ahead of the competition." 

A key step will be breaking the Toyota mold as a purveyor of safe, reliable -- but boring -- vehicles. 

Upcoming redesigns, such as the Camry and Lexus LS sedan slated to debut in January in Detroit, will indicate whether "ever-better cars" is truly re-rooting from mere motto to mindset. 

So will the Lexus LC coupe arriving next year and the upcoming Toyota C-HR. 

Akio Toyoda is a hardcore car guy who still dons his race suit and helmet to compete, most recently in an October rally race in rural Japan. Simply put, he says, to make fun-to-drive cars, Toyota needs more employees who have fun driving. 

That's where it's epic global road trip comes in. 

"My biggest hope is that Five Continents Drive members get the same feelings I do," Toyoda says. "That's what I want to do, and that's why I stay on as president. That's all."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hans Greimel, Automotive News’ Tokyo-based Asia Editor, joined the Argentina leg of Toyota’s Five Continents Drive in November. He was the first journalist to embed with the cavalcade as it took on the dusty, sun-baked foothills of the Andes mountains.