THEY SAY INTERVIEW Jim Lentz, president Toyota Motor North America

They Say...

Jim Lentz PRESIDENT, TOYOTA MOTOR NORTH AMERICA

Jim Lentz has been Toyota’s top American executive for more than a decade, calmly guiding the Toyota, Lexus, and Scion brands through the recession and into the current boom. Lentz spoke to Motor Trend at the Detroit auto show in January.

Interview

You predicted years ago that the RAV4 would outsell the Camry, and now it has.

How far can SUVs go? Last year, we sold 407,000 RAVs, including in Canada, and Camry was 387,000. The shift from passenger cars to light trucks has been 3–4 percentage points a year. That’s going to slow, but there still will be some movement. Obviously the big growth has been in the small SUV segment, and I don’t see that slowing down.

Toyota has recently shown some interesting, rugged small SUV concepts such as the FT-4X. Do you see a return of an FJ Cruiser-type vehicle?

As all these SUVs get larger, and we see proliferation in the overall SUV segment—there is room on the lower end in terms of price or authenticity for an authentic, off-road, frame-based SUV, which is what the FJ was. This would be for people truly going off-road. This would not be all-wheel drive for safety. This would be four-wheel drive with ground clearance. The difference is in wheel travel, and you can only do that with frame-based. This could be FJ-sized, but for an enthusiast, it’s gotta be something with a small wheelbase to be more maneuverable when in the rocks.

Where does the SUV trend leave the

4Runner and Sequoia? The jury is still out. Most SUVs have gone car-based because they needed to get lighter. There’s market demand for frame-based SUVs, but we have to crunch all the CAFE numbers to see if there’s room for them in our lineup. 4Runner continues to do well, but the softest segment is for big SUVs, where Sequoia is. Midsize SUV rear-seat packages are so good, and the size has gotten larger.

This is the longest introduction in the history of mankind.Ó

Lentz talking about the new Supra

Toyota and Mazda just announced a shared plant in Alabama that will build Corollas and a small Mazda SUV. What happens to the other plants already building Corollas?

We had moved Corolla out of Canada to Guanajuato, Mexico, to make room for more RAVs. And we used our Baja plant for more Tacomas, which we were building at a 60,000-unit annual rate in December. The pickup market continues to grow, so we needed more pickup capacity. The quickest way to make this happen was to move Tacoma production to Guanajuato. We got Mississippi building 165,000 Corollas, and the new joint venture in Alabama will build 150,000 more.

First sharing the Yaris with Mazda2, now the plant. Is Toyota getting cozy with

Mazda? The biggest thing is the philosophy of the two companies. They are both headquartered in an area where they’ve been for a long time. Mazda is having the 100th anniversary of being in Hiroshima in 2020. Mazda is a company that really loves cars and loves driving cars. That’s a good match for us.

BMW has already shown its Z4, which will be shared with a Toyota sports car. Anything you want to say about the new

Supra? We have no announcements yet. This is the longest introduction in the history of mankind.

Toyota recently announced it would launch 10 EVs globally by the early 2020s. But how many are destined for the U.S. market?

Demand still is not there in the U.S. The good news is that the need for EVs in China and Europe is creating a global push for EVs. When demand comes here, we will have a stable of EVs to choose from. Battery EVs have been on the market as long as hybrids in the modern era. Hybrids have gone from 0 to 2.7 percent of the market in 18 years. EVs are still at about a half-point of share. Even if it grows more quickly, it’s difficult to see a robust EV market in the near future. Unlike hybrids, EVs still have range and infrastructure challenges.

Toyota held back from using Apply CarPlay and Android Auto. But the 2019 Avalon will

have CarPlay. What changed? Everyone wants to control the center stack of the car. When you look at who’s responsible for the safety [of the information within] the center stack, it’s on the OEM. So we need to control it. Apple understands that need. Not everyone does.

What do you think of the Lexus LF-1 flag-

ship SUV concept? This is on a platform that could go to market. We think there’s a market for a vehicle like this. There is an insatiable appetite for light trucks. And the luxury segment is moving as hard as the mainstream.

The German luxury brands have had turbofour engines forever, but the idea is new to Lexus. How have Lexus customers reacted

to turbocharging? Turbos are viewed as a higher-tech engine, so luxury customers see it as a step ahead of a naturally aspirated engine. Just like hatchbacks were. They were the cheap cars; now they’re the cool cars. But it’s about how you execute the turbo or the hatch. Mark Rechtin