The Prius That Shook.. - VFAQ Prius Site

vehicles). The Vehicle Development Center IV was
established the following year specially for the R&D of units
and new engines.
Each of the first three Vehicle Development Centers
included divisions for planning, design, and development
and research for various components, such as vehicle, body,
chassis and power train (engine). The Chief Engineer of each
model was directly under the individual Development
Centers. This basically enabled the development of new
models to be completed within a Development Center.
The first three Development Centers were each staffed
with 1,500 to 1,900 people, and the Fourth Vehicle
Development Center was staffed with 4,000 people. The
organizations were now scaled down to the size of 20
years ago - the perfect size for the head of each Center
to supervise everything and for individual engineers to clearly
know their roles and targets.
Executive Vice President Kimbara commented on the
results of introducing the Center System in the April 16,
1997 issue of the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper: "The
consciousness of our engineers has changed from focusing
on function alone to optimizing a car. It has become
easier to develop a better car."
The key players in the implementation of this massive
engineering reform were Mr. Akio Matsubara, General
Manager of Technical Administration Division (now
Member of the Board), and Mr. Takeshi Uchiyamada, who
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