Takeo Fukui Charged Up for Hybrid Car Duel

Honda’s CEO Takeo Fukui is a man driven by the desire to have his company on top of the automobile heap, and that kind of drive means someone who hates losing. A fiercely competitive man, the 63-year old boss of Honda Motors is now looking to up the ante in the company’s battle with its Japanese rival Toyota Motor in hybrid technology.

Toyota made an impact in green technology in the automobile arena when it launched its Prius in 1997. The 1997 launch gave it a two-year lead on Honda Motors, which came out with its two-seater, Insight, in 1999. By 2003, it had established itself as the leader in the hybrid technology space with its second generation Prius.

While Toyota has gone from strength to strength since the Prius launch, Honda has not been able to keep things up and running continuously since its 1999 Insight launch. The company stopped the sale of two hybrid models that were low on power. What this meant was that the company’s sales in the hybrid technology arena was way short of Toyota’s, as it had just one model left, the gasoline-electric Civic.

All that is soon about to change, according to Fukui, and the changes could start manifesting as early as next week. Honda is set to launch three hybrid cars over the next few years, cars that are cheap thanks to advances in technology that the carmaker is using extensively.

One factor that could help boost the sales of the Honda hybrids is the skyrocketing prices of fuel. The company is predicting sales of about 500,000 units by 2015. If it can achieve that number, it would mean a nine-fold increase in sales from the numbers of last year.

Speaking about Honda’s plans, Fukui said, “We’re losing the image game in Japan to Toyota, and that’s tough to take.” He also said that as far as he was concerned, he knew that Honda still held an edge over Toyota in the biggest auto market in the world, the United States, when it came to the environmental cachet.

Hitting away at an objective despite several rounds of failure is not new to Fukui. He faced a similar situation during his early days in Honda in 1969, a time when Honda mostly worked on developing motorcycles and engines.

Soichiro Honda, the legendary founder of the company had once rebuked him for not being able to come up with a design that could bring down the toxic exhaust emissions in car engines. He had not been able to achieve success despite repeated attempts, at which point he got the reprimand from Mr. Honda.

The rebuke had its effect as, following Mr. Honda’s advice to ‘think out of the box’; Fukui managed to put together an engine and a car that was certified in the United States as the first one to pass the U.S. Clean Air Act simply on its engine performance. The engine in question was the CVCC engine, and the car got the name Civic, a smashing success that was responsible for Honda entering the global auto market in a big way.

As the head of R&D at Honda, a post once Mr. Honda himself held, Fukui encouraged the company’s employees to go all out. Now it remains to be seen what will come of the company’s plans with regard to the hybrid technology, and how soon in real terms the changes will happen.