Despite the year's product shortages, Toyota of Europe CEO Didier Leroy expects the maker to handily top its strong 2010 sales.
“We’re back,” proclaimed Didier Leroy, the CEO of Toyota of Europe, as he began the maker’s press preview at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.
That might have seemed an odd thing to say less than a year ago, when Toyota seemed to have unstoppable momentum. But that was before the Japanese earthquake of March 11 that brought the country’s auto industry to a near stop. In the months that followed, Toyota lost about three-quarters of a million units of production.
Working frantically with its suppliers, the maker says it has not gotten its plants in Japan, the U.S. and Europe back up and running at normal capacity as of this week. Now it has to play a game of catch-up.
Toyoda of Europe is updating its key Avensis model.
In many key markets, notably including Europe and Japan, the industry giant has suffered double-digit sales declines since the March disaster. As production has been ramping up it has begun pitching consumers with stepped-up incentive programs. And now, it appears ready to unleash a full-fledged campaign to rebuild its sales and market share.
The timing couldn’t be better in Europe, where Toyota is marking the new model-year with the launch of several key products including new versions of the big Avensis and subcompact Yaris, as well as two additions to what will become a family of Prius-badged hybrids.
The Prius Plug-in is designed to get as much as 14.5 miles driving range on its batteries alone. The Prius+ is a more conventional hybrid but larger than the original Prius sedan.
“We have recovered quicker than we even expected,” said Leroy, during his news conference.
The maker is looking to for some significant sales gains in the final months of the year, Leroy predicting 2011 will ultimately come in about 20,000 units ahead of last year’s European total. For 2010, it sold 781,157 vehicles on the Continent, including 30,411 wearing the Lexus badge.
Meanwhile, Didier predicted “Our sales of hybrid vehicles will grow at least 20% compared to last year,” with the launch of the new models.
The maker expects to have nine different Lexus and Toyota hybrids in European showrooms by the end of 2012.
To underscore its confidence in a turnaround, Didier announced that Toyota will add another 800 jobs at a key factory in France.