Hiroshi Okuda, Toyota chief who pushed forward the radical Prius hybrid car

In 1995 Okuda succeeded two generations of the founding Toyoda family to become president and chief executive of Toyota Motor Corporation at a time when it was shedding market share at home and abroad, its previously rampant export sales afflicted by low-cost competition and the strength of the yen. 

Having spent much of his own career in international roles, Okuda pushed forcefully to build local production capacity in North America, Europe, India and China.

Toyota’s reputation had hitherto been that of a “fast follower” of advances in automotive technology, rather than a pioneer. But its Prius concept, combining electric and petrol power, offered a radical alternative to the conventional internal combustion engine that had ruled for a century. 

On the drawing ​board since 1993, it had encountered design problems in its electronic systems ​and was not due for production until late 1998 – until, against opposition from his own senior engineers, Okuda commanded it to be delivered a year earlier.

“Before I became president, the company was considered to be very conservative,” he told an interviewer, “So I have tried to make us more aggressive.”

The Prius was unveiled in October 1997, two months ahead of the new schedule; Toyota went on to sell more than 6 million of successive generations of Prius in the first 20 years of production and to be, since 2008, the world’s largest automaker by volume.​

Son of the manager of a small stockbroking office, Hiroshi Okuda was born on December 29 1932 in the southern Japanese prefecture of Mie, near the city of Nagoya. During the second world war the family was evacuated to a remote village.

Okuda graduated from Hitotsubashi, Tokyo’s prestigious university of commerce – where he competed in judo tournaments as a black belt – before joining Toyota’s accounting division in 1955. In the traditional Japanese way, he laboured loyally through many layers of corporate hierarchy to reach the top, though he later became an advocate for faster promotion of talented executives.

According to company legend, as Toyota’s manager in the Philippines in the early 1970s, Okuda trekked into the jungle to meet leftist guerrillas who had threatened a local assembly plant. Later he oversaw the company’s interests throughout Asia and Oceania.

Unusually outspoken but by one account “always ready with a quick laugh”, Okuda was the first chairman, from 2002 to 2006, of the Japan Business Federation, formed from the merger of Keidanren (equivalent to the UK’s CBI) with the Federation of Employers’ Associations.

He also chaired the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association and served on the prime minister’s Economic Strategy Council. From these various platforms he commented freely on the need for fiscal reform and challenge to entrenched business practices in pursuit of new economic dynamism – including encouraging international talent to work in Japan. His belief was that companies “must change when things are going well: there’s no point in trying to change after things start going bad.”

Another sales triumph during Okuda’s Toyota reign was the compact “crossover” RAV4 SUV, launched in 1994, which effectively created a new market segment and has sold more than 15 million units.

Promoted from president to chairman in 1999, he retired in 2006 to beco​me “senior adviser” and was reported to have agitated unsuccessfully for the ousting as president of Akio Toyoda (grandson of the founder and still chairman today) after a global recall in 2010 of 8 million vehicles for accelerator defects.

No details were made public of Hiroshi Okuda’s surviving family; his younger brother Tsutomu Okuda was also a prominent business figure as chairman of the Daimaru retail group.

​Hiroshi Okuda, born December 29 1932, died August 8 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]