LAS VEGAS — After Akio Toyoda took the stage at the Michelob Ultra Arena at Mandalay Bay and demonstrated his "happy dance" — a couple of steps that looked to my eyes like a joyous folk dance from Spain or Poland — he lavished much praise on recently retired American sales chief Bob Carter.
I was among a handful of journalists shown an edited video of his address to the annual dealers' meeting before we interviewed the CEO of the world's largest automaker, whose brands have consistently topped the charts in the National Automobile Dealers Association's twice-yearly surveys of franchisee satisfaction.
Carter spent 41 years with Toyota, and his career culminated with the unexpected U.S. sales win over General Motors amid the turbulence of the global pandemic and a chip crisis that the Japanese company had prepared for, though maybe not quite as well as it had thought.