There is a surprising change at the helm of Toyota Motor, the world's largest automaker.
66-year-old Akio Toyoda will take over as Chairman of the Board of Directors on April 1.
The new president and boss of the company is to be Koji Sato, who previously managed the luxury brand Lexus and the company's motorsport activities.
As chairman of the board, Toyota succeeds Takeshi Uchiyamada, who remains a member of the board.
Patrick Welter
Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.
Follow I follow
Toyoda, the grandson of company founder Kiichiro Toyoda, took over the management of the traditional Japanese company in 2009, when Toyota, after years of rapid growth and in the wake of the global financial crisis, slipped into a serious crisis of its own.
Plagued by quality defects and recalls in the United States, the company was looking for new confidence and stability with the new boss from the founding family.
The enthusiastic car enthusiast Toyoda, who still drives for the company today as a racing driver under the name Morizo, for example in long-distance races, promised customers driving pleasure.
Early in his tenure, Toyoda described the state of the automotive industry as a crisis of the century, because the younger generation drives less cars and because with the change to greener drives, big electronics companies like Apple or Sony and newcomers like Tesla are pushing into the business.
Toyoda set the automaker the goal of transforming itself into a broad-based mobility company.
Daily struggle for survival
In this transformation, he now considers it necessary to support Toyota and the new President as Chairman of the Board of Directors, Toyoda justified the decision on Thursday in a press conference broadcast on the Internet.
As so often in recent years, Toyoda also let a personal touch shine through.
"Looking back, the past 13 years have been a time of struggling to survive from one day to the next," he said.
"That's my honest feeling."
In the Toyoda years, Toyota vied with German supplier Volkswagen for global leadership.
Toyoda, however, attached less importance to this, at least in public, and never tired of emphasizing the traditional values of customer satisfaction and continuous improvement in the production process.
In his early years as Toyota President, he consciously put the brakes on expansion in order to eliminate quality defects and improve profit margins.
Later, Toyoda gave the company, which had been internationalized for a long time, a far-reaching structural reform.
As a company within the company, individual departments were given more autonomy.
In Japan, Toyoda also deepened and established cooperation with Daihatsu Motor, Mazda Motor, Subaru and Suzuki Motor through cross-shareholdings.
This broadened the base and enabled cost-sharing for large investments in self-driving cars and new propulsion technologies.
Paving the way for the future
Toyota recognized the need for environmentally friendly cars earlier than many other suppliers, and in 1997 launched the Prius model, a hybrid drive consisting of a petrol engine and an electric motor.
Toyota was also one of the first companies, along with South Korean supplier Hyundai Motor, to launch a series-produced electric car powered by hydrogen and fuel cells.
The "Mirai" - in German future - went into production in 2014.
At that time, the international competition and above all German car manufacturers were still banking on clean diesel as the drive of the future.
Toyota is nevertheless accused of oversleeping the development towards battery electric cars.
While the European competitors in particular were strategically switching to electric cars under political pressure, Toyota only launched its first battery electric car on the market last year, in China.
Toyoda counters this criticism by saying that battery electric cars make sense in some, but by no means all, uses.
According to the company, this applies regionally because, for example, in many developing countries the power grids will not be stable enough to support an electrified car infrastructure for many years to come.
This also applies to different uses, such as short distances in the city or long distances overland.
The outgoing President is therefore pleading for Toyota to offer a range of different, environmentally friendly drives that appeal to all sorts of customers around the world.
Last year, Toyota unveiled a roadmap detailing more than a dozen battery electric cars it plans to launch in the coming years.
The company also relies on solid-state batteries developed in-house, which promise less weight and a longer range.
Toyota wants to have it ready for series production by 2025.
At the same time, Toyota is also working on using hydrogen as a fuel to retain combustion technology and to use the older cars in an environmentally friendly manner.