Mr. Kenrou Sekino Born May, 1923

< The Land Cruiser strategy >

Until about 1955 Toyota mainly exported large-sized trucks, but there was a lot of competition in this field, and because of some inadequacies on the performance side, we were not able to export as many of these as we had expected. That left the Jeep and the Land Rover as competitive targets, and the Land Cruiser was superior to both in terms of performance, so we decided to go after those export markets. This led to development of the Land Cruiser strategy in 1956. At first we avoided competing head on with automakers in the developed countries, and advanced into the markets of Central and South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, where we were quite successful.

< The name Land Cruiser >

The Land Cruiser did not sell well right from the beginning. However it did start selling when it went from being a ''Toyoda'' brand to a Toyota brand. The pronunciation seemed to work better with the hard consonant than the soft one, but the name Land Cruiser had already been established, and was a good one. The solution was found in shortening it to a nickname, the Lan-Cru. People inside the company started calling it the Lan-Cru, and the name even stuck overseas.

< A little-known story on the development of the van >

At first the hooded version of this model was all that was available, but the demand increased from South America for a van type version, where it rains heavily. Because the body would outlast the hood, it was considered more economical to pay more at the beginning for a van type than to have to replace the hood a few times. Therefore a van was produced and sold at a higher price, but this change also increased the cost of shipping the car to an unacceptable level. Rather than pass that cost on to the customer, the solution was chosen to ship the parts and assemble the car locally.

In 1959 a demonstration was carried out before the chief officers of the Army in India, as part of the efforts to propose building an Indian national car. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as a business deal, but this was a very good experience for us.