SATO'S NEW ERA

Akio Toyoda stepped down as Toyota's CEO knowing a younger person was needed to navigate today's complex automotive landscape. That person was Gazoo Racing and Lexus leader Koji Sato. Jim Holder meets him

“I thought he was kidding!" One day Koji Sato was a senior executive at the Toyota Motor Corporation, company lifer and engineer of much renown, head of its Gazoo Racing performance and Lexus luxury divisions and holder of numerous nose-bleedingly senior management titles. The next he was stood at a race track in Thailand, chatting and testing cars with the incumbent president and CEO, Akio Toyoda, when he was asked if he fancied running the world's largest car maker at the most pivotal point in its history. Even after his stellar career advancement, it came as a total shock.

Laugh. Smile. Gulp. At the last count, Toyota had 372,817 employees, sold 10.5 million cars (making it the world's biggest car and commercial vehicle company by volume for the third straight year) and enjoyed annual operating profits of upwards of £10 billion.

But, to paraphrase Toyoda, it also had a host of problems that he was simply too old to fix himself, all driven by the need to morph from car maker to mobility company in an era of zeroemissions challenges, changing software and technical expectations, autonomy and more.

Well prepared he may have been, but Sato aged 53 to Toyoda's 66 and now a few months into the role - doesn't shy away from admitting to feeling the pressure, at least initially.

"I felt this huge responsibility," he says. "I was worried whether I would be able to repeat the success alone. But it was Akio who told me not to feel that way but to approach it rather as a team captain. That changed my view; from that moment, I felt it was possible. I could be the boss but we could support each other to achieve our goals. I have a team around me and I must enable them to achieve success, not do it all myself."