Hybrid leader Lexus to go from green to mean

The straighty-180 of the automotive world is about to develop some attitude.

Lexus, the world leader in petrol-electric technology, is about to muddy its green image, promising a range of high performance vehicles to be borne out of its newly-gained freedom.

The third-generation boss of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, has removed six layers of bureaucracy and appointed a global boss for its luxury Lexus brand reporting directly to the top.

In a frank interview with Australian journalists at the launch of the new GS sedan at Pebble Beach in California, the general manager of Lexus Karl Schlicht, explained how the new world order worked – including not being tied exclusively to its green image.

“We want the brand to meet an environmental obligation but we don’t think every car or every motor has to be hybrid or green,” he said. “I don’t know if the Greenpeace people will like us for that. But there is a market that still wants emotion.

“We’re not big in [performance cars] but we think we need some part of our business to be emotional and aspirational because … wealthy people around the world still want both. Some people want more of one or the other, whether it’s power or environmental, but we need to understand that they want both.

“The IS-F is not a one-off. The F concept is a strong pillar of our brand going forward.”

Fifty-year-old Schlicht, who is Melbourne-born, of German descent, but considers himself Canadian after migrating there aged five, established Lexus in Canada before running the marque in the UK and then Europe. He now runs Lexus worldwide from Japan and was one of the key drivers for change.

“When I started there, Lexus was a 400,000-something unit [per year] car company, Toyota was 7-something million, but we still had to go through all the same meetings that Toyota has to go through,” he said.

“It was hugely frustrating and slow, especially for a small brand. Personality gets filtered out of anything when you go through that many meetings. You average out everything.

“We needed to get smaller, we needed to get more nimble and we needed a personality [to push Lexus’ cause with Toyota management].

“With Akio’s appointment, we’ve cut out six intermediary executives that we used to have to report to. Today we don’t have to do that. We can inform them but they don’t make any key decisions.”

He said design review meetings – where the styling of a car is given the ‘green light’ immediately prior to production, had up to 100 people involved in the decision-making process. Today, a core team of 25 or so people sign-off future designs.

“The [previous] design review committees had the same group of committee members that Toyota would have, so you’d end up with an averaging effect,” he said. “We now only have a smaller group of only Lexus related people.”

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