Takeshi Uchiyamada: The Chief Engineer Who Built the First Prius
Takeshi Uchiyamada led the first Prius as chief engineer with no product-development background. He could not lead the traditional shusa way, so he put the whole team and the whole car in one room — the obeya. How he integrated the car, led engineers he couldn't command, and met an impossible deadline.
Takeshi Uchiyamada: The Chief Engineer Who Built the First Prius
Takeshi Uchiyamada was a chief engineer who led the development of the hybrid Prius for Toyota. He had never run a product-development program before and was not a typical engineer. His background was applied physics, control software, and vehicle testing. That is not the body, chassis, or engine line that usually produces a chief engineer. Consequently he could not lead the typical way, by out-arguing every function from his own technical mastery. No one at Toyota, including him, had ever built a hybrid car. This required assembling new types of knowledge, technology, and standards within the company. As a result he refined how a chief engineer leads a vehicle development program. More than any previous program he often put the whole team, and the whole car, in one room. That style of management and the large-room management practice became what is commonly called the obeya system. Toyota had large rooms and team meetings before but Uchiyamada and the Prius program took it to another level.
For the role in general, see the main guide, What Is the Toyota Chief Engineer (Shusa) System?.
Who Was Takeshi Uchiyamada?
Uchiyamada was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1946. His father, Kameo Uchiyamada, was himself a Toyota development chief engineer. As a boy he read a biography of Ferdinand Porsche and set his mind on building cars. He studied applied physics at Nagoya University. He picked it because the future of cars would need control systems, not just mechanical engineering. He joined Toyota in 1969. He wrote control software, then spent eighteen years in vehicle testing. Testing let him see the whole car rather than one part. He later moved to engineering administration and helped set up Toyota’s Vehicle Development Centers. In January 1994 he was named to lead the G21 project. After the Prius he became chairman of Toyota, from 2013 to 2023.
How Did Uchiyamada Put the Whole Car in One Room?
In early 1994 the G21 team needed somewhere to work. Uchiyamada got them an old conference room on the sixth floor of an engineering building. It had red carpet. It had once been used for board meetings. People around the company started calling the team “the weird bunch in the red carpet room.”
The room did one early thing no normal office or program did. Uchiyamada kept a full-size side view of the latest car taped to the wall. That was his idea. Engineers usually worked from a one-fifth-scale drawing on their own desk. The life-size drawing on the wall let everyone see the real car. They could point at it. Here is the roofline. Here is the engine bay. The whole team shared one picture of what they were building.
The hybrid style of engine used in the Prius was too cross-cutting for typical methods to work. For example, in a traditional program the chief engineer walked the design floor and worked each function one at a time. But no single department owned the hybrid program. It cut across engine, motor, battery, power electronics, control software, and body. So Uchiyamada brought the functions into one room together. Design, engineering, evaluation, production engineering, and suppliers met face to face. The schedule, the open problems, and the key decisions went on the walls. A problem that crossed departments got settled on the spot. It did not wait for separate meetings and written reports.
Big rooms and wall displays were not new at Toyota. They have existed since the TQC programs of the 1960s for management. Visual displays of information were also common place but somewhat local in nature. What the Prius did was turn them into a new type of management method. The team systematized the room, the roles, processes, metrics, and the practices. It became known as the obeya (大部屋, “big room”) style of management. After the Prius, Toyota learned to use the obeya for plant launches, quality campaigns, and global platform programs. It is now a standard part of how Toyota develops a car. It is likely the most lasting thing Uchiyamada’s program added to the role of the chief engineer and to the entire company.
How Did He Lead Engineers He Couldn’t Command?
Uchiyamada owned the car. But he could not order the functional engineers what to do. A fight over the suspension showed how he worked instead.
Two groups had rival designs. One was a Torsion Beam from one development center. The other was a Diagonal Beam from another. Uchiyamada did not pick by fiat. He ran a contest. Present both at once, under the same conditions, he said, and the engineers “won’t have any grudges against each other.”
The Torsion Beam won. It was reliable, had room to improve, and left more trunk space. Uchiyamada had actually favored the Diagonal Beam. He then asked the engineer whose design had lost, Shimatani, to come and help perfect the winner. “Shimatani-san, I feel rather awkward, but would you help us out in the mass-production stage of the process? We really need the Diagonal Beam technology that you developed now applied to this technology.” Shimatani was glad to. He held no grudge. The choice had been argued out in the open, and he had said his piece.
How Did the Fuel-Economy Target Force the Hybrid?
The G21 team first proposed a car with 1.5 times the fuel economy of a Corolla. They would get there by improving the gasoline engine. The executive in charge of development, Vice President Akihiro Wada, was not satisfied. He told them to double it.
A 50 percent gain was reachable with carried-over technology. Doubling was not. It could only be done with a hybrid system. The technology looked premature. The cost looked too high. Uchiyamada agonized over it. But he reasoned that Toyota would have to face the hybrid eventually. Even if this car failed, running the cycle once would hand its lessons to the next one. He committed. (Wada’s side of the same decision is in the article on Akihiro Wada.)
How Did Uchiyamada Hold an Impossible Deadline?
In his role as chief engineer Uchiyamada recounts how the schedule moved against him twice. The first plan assumed a 1999 launch. Adopting the hybrid technology pulled it to 1998 launch. Then, in late 1995, the new president Hiroshi Okuda pushed it to 1997. Okuda put it bluntly to Wada. “That is too late. Can you get it done a year earlier? This car may change the course of Toyota’s future, and even the auto industry.”
Uchiyamada however did not just accept the date. He negotiated his terms. He proposed milestone management instead. He would run by fixed checkpoints. He kept the right to slow down if the quality could not be built in. Building the quality in mattered more than the date. Management agreed.
Next he had to convince the team. Most of them thought December 1997 was impossible. He reached back in history for two examples. NASA had no proven way to reach the moon and back in ten years, yet Apollo finished on time. Japanese engineers had built the Shusui rocket fighter from thin wartime data in about a year. If those teams could do it, he argued, so could this one. High expectations can be used to motivate people if handled correctly.
The early going however was brutal. The first prototype was finished in autumn 1995. It did not move for forty-nine days. When it finally ran, it went 500 meters. Its fuel economy was worse than a Corolla’s. So the team set climbing targets. First 1.3 times, then 1.5, then 1.7. They chased them one at a time. “I don’t want it said that we were the ones who couldn’t make line off” became the team’s watchword. From May 1997 they ran a 24-hour team working cycle in alternating shifts. Test by day. Rewrite the control software by night. Test again the next morning. Meet, solve problems, and decide next steps in the afternoon.
The first Prius launched in December 1997. Its slogan was “We made it in time for the 21st century.” It got 28 kilometers per liter. It cost 2.15 million yen. The monthly sales target was 1,000. Actual orders in Japan far surpassed that level. The customer waiting time reached six months. Toyota raised output to 2,000, then 3,000.
What Does the Prius Show About the Chief Engineer System?
The Prius shows the chief engineer system working as a chain, not a solo act. Uchiyamada owned the car. Wada, above him, set the stretch target and could have killed the project. Functional departments still owned the engineering details. Okuda set and locked the deadline. The chairman’s challenge had started it all. Each level trusted the one below it. That trust rested on technical competence at every level.
What Is “The Prius That Shook the World”?
Uchiyamada did not write a book about his tenure as chief engineer. The fullest account of the development is by the journalist Hideshi Itazaki: The Prius That Shook the World: How Toyota Developed the World’s First Mass-Production Hybrid Vehicle. Itazaki watched Toyota for four years and interviewed the development team over six months. The book came out in Japanese in 1999. Albert Yamada and Masako Ishikawa translated it into English (The Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, ISBN 978-4526043765). The English edition is normally out of print and somewhat hard to find. Used copies turn up on Amazon, AbeBooks, and similar sellers.
Sources
This article draws on the Japan Automotive Hall of Fame profile of Takeshi Uchiyamada and heavily on Hideshi Itazaki’s The Prius That Shook the World, together with firsthand knowledge of the Toyota chief engineer system. The red-carpet room, the full-size wall drawing, and the suspension contest are drawn from Itazaki. Dates and figures were cross-checked against Toyota’s published records. Quotations are from the English edition of Itazaki.
Art Smalley is president of Art of Lean, Inc.