The Toyota Motor Corporation will never lead the field in standardised design but it has an unfailing gift for innovatively surprising ideas.”This has been a century of unparalleled exploration in search of new life styles and the car designs to match them. So, motor manufacturers go for concept cars that point to future developments”. The words are those of Kazuo Morohoshi, Senior General Manager of Toyota’s TMC Style Centre in Japan. And of the 16 or more different concepts, on the Toyota/Daihatsu’s Tokyo stand, four were rather special.
The FSX is a pure sports car concept powered by a front-mounted 4.2 litre V8 engine that announces Toyota’s intention to join a segment it had always ignored until now.
Meanwhile, the RSC explores a new kind of sports concept, a combination of the traditional coupé and the ultra-functional vehicle that participates in the World Rally Championships.
Nothing could be more different from the DMT, whose imposing bulk marks a genuinely intriguing interior package. The DMT could be practically anything: a mobile laboratory, a camper or an office on wheels.
And to top it all, the usually traditionalist Toyota came up with the astonishing POD. “This”, explains Morohoshi, “is the outcome of the Group’s partnership with Sony. The idea was to come up with a way of communicating the driver’s state of mind to the outside world using light or sound signals. On the POD the signal lights turn red if the driver gets angry or blue when he feels sad.”
“We have gone for so much variety in order to deliver the message that while Japanese manufacturers now pay a lot more attention to conceptual innovation, we are also convinced that content matters even on a show car”, he concludes.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 131
