A former top Toyota US executive has blamed the recall crisis on former executives too focused on profitability, and said current president Akio Toyoda is “the only person who can save Toyota.”
Jim Press, once the senior American executive at Toyota Motor Sales USA and, later, its North American unit, said in a statement emailed to the Wall Street Journal that the “the root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates. They didn’t have the character to maintain a customer first focus. Akio does.”
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“Akio Toyoda is not only up for the job, but he is the only person who can save Toyota,” Press said in his email. He left Toyota in 2007.
Toyoda is set to testify in a congressional hearing later on Wednesday.
In his prepared testimony, released on Tuesday, Toyoda offered an apology to customers and vowed that Toyota would go back to basics to address quality problems.
“Toyota doesn’t want me to speak out, but I can’t stand it anymore and somebody has to tell it like it is,” the WSJ quoted Press as saying. “What the company needs now is for everyone in the company to get behind Akio and do everything possible to emerge from this mess as an even stronger company.”
Press spent 37 years at Toyota and eventually became the first non-Japanese elected to the company’s board of directors.
He left Toyota to join Chrysler Group, where he last served as deputy chief executive. He left in December.
