The Prius That Shook.. - VFAQ Prius Site

work."
Suzaki encouraged his staff to try harder. In the meantime,
he discussed the matter with Uchiyamada to prepare him for a
worst-case scenario.
"As a supplementary group, we can't hold up the others.
We are thinking of going back to the three-row design if worse
comes to worst."
"Suzaki-san, don't give up yet. It is still too early. Please stay
with it until we really run out of time."
As Uchiyamada was trying to change the development
system through the Prius project, he thought, "If we give up
here, we'll come out of this with no results. If we keep falling
back on backup plans and fearing risks, we will never
progress. The new concept of Prius makes it worthwhile to try
new things. Unlike model-changing the Crown, delaying the
launch of Prius by one month because of this should not be
so damaging."
However, no breakthroughs in development followed.
Around this time, representatives from each department
involved in the development for Prius started to meet every
two to three weeks to present progress reports. Every six weeks, a
meeting was held to report on the progress to the executives in
charge of development and production technology.
The cooling group came under a lot of criticism at the
report meetings. At a meeting held in early winter, Deputy
General Manager Takahide Kawamura of the Electric
Vehicle Division in charge of the inverter,
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