Toyota chief silences the doubters

He'd heard it so often he began to believe it himself. Too young. Not up to the task. Didn't deserve it. Only there because of his name.

"I probably won't last a year as president, but at least I can finally do something for the company." Akio Toyoda says those doubts haunted him in early 2010, eight months into the top job at the carmaker his father once ran and his grandfather founded. Eight months in which he'd been all but invisible as defects in cars bearing the family name were tied to deadly crashes in the US. And now he was headed for Washington to apologise to Congress and the American people.

"All the vice-presidents were 10 years older than me," Toyota Motor's chief confided in an impromptu interview over tea at a hotel near Tokyo's Imperial Palace. "Compared to them, even though I was president. Well. You know."

Toyoda has since made a convincing case for himself as head of the world's biggest carmaker. As this year's Tokyo Motor Show gets under way, Toyota is on track for a record profit, its Lexus luxury unit predicts the best-ever year of sales, and industry surveys show public questions over quality are fading.

It's a remarkable turnaround for an executive who got off to a shaky start handling one of the worst crises in Toyota's 76-year history. Toyoda has remade his image as a hands-on guy who loves the smell of petrol and whose passion for racing is adding spice to a brand better known as bland and reliable. Far from getting kicked out, he's set the stage for a reign that may outdo even the 17 years his father spent in charge.

"What you're seeing today is Akio asserting himself," said David Herro, chief investment officer at Chicago-based Harris Associates, which holds more than US$280 million of the shares. "This is what we like: more action and results, more focus on protecting the brand. And the numbers speak for themselves."