Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
At a recent family braai, my cousin from the Rooi Kalahari was trapped in painfully polite conversation with a vegan visitor who seemed fascinated by the carcass browning on the spit. No one around the fire knew how to act towards the vegan, but the Kalahari cousin did his best. “So, they tell me you are a virgin, but I can promise you, this meat is made with pure grass,” he told the visitor as he tapped the sizzling lamb with his pocketknife.
As her eyes and our sudden grins widened, his teenage son urgently whispered a short lesson in the levels of vegetarianism in his ear. The cousin looked first at his son then to the visitor to apologise, but she had made a hasty retreat to the kitchen where a lot of cackling could be heard from the women.
This is where the talk got very technical very fast when the topic turned to the new Land Cruiser’s bonnet.
A bonnet worth discussing
I argued that the elevated bonnet must have been the most cost-effective way to shoehorn the proven GD6 engine over the massive front differential, without having to redesign the manifolds and intercooler, sump, and oil gallery to make everything fit.
The fruit-farming cousin from Mbombela said he thinks the gulley between the hood and the windshield may improve airflow over the blunt nose a little bit, but he could assure us that the weird bump doesn’t impair forward visibility at all.
Kalahari cousin said he would have preferred if the old 4.2 engine was given an electric supercharger, with a common rail to lower the emissions, though he couldn’t think of any place on Earth where Cruiser owners thought of carbon as something plants needed less off.
The teenage son, who is doing a course in business management, agreed with me, adding that the cost-saving redesign was all part of Toyota’s journey to transform from a vehicle maker into a mobility company, one in which all staff are a ‘source of earnings’ rather than a ‘cost’.
An investment lesson
“Farmers can take a page from Toyota’s playbook; they are looking at a return on equity of 20%. This is very high for the manufacturing sector and would make Toyota one of the top performers among car companies. But they’ll have to move from one-off profits made from selling vehicles, to something like a subscription model from renting out things like exoskeletons to get to 20%,” the teenager said.
We elders all just nodded like we knew exactly what the lad was talking about, but he could see we were all faking it.
“It’s like this,” he explained, “instead of you selling stock or hay or fruit once a season to a middleman, you develop a co-ownership model where someone owns one or more productive units and pay you to manage these units. Such farm-to-client contracts are already used between cattle farmers and stokvels, for instance. Or you can fractionalise ownership of, for example, an orchard and ensure delivery direct to the owners.”
Kalahari cousin shook his head as he put his arm around his son. “Those sound like good plans, but if living in a student commune taught me one thing, it is that someone has to take ownership else nobody does nothing.”
A shifting demographic
I wanted to hear more about the exoskeletons, and I said as much. Hay bales and salt licks are not getting any lighter and I like the idea of steering hydraulic limbs to do the heavy lifting.
“That’s what Toyota is also thinking,” the teen entrepreneur said. “Global demographics already show that far fewer babies are being born while people live a lot longer. This means every year will see fewer new car buyers while yesteryear’s Corolla racers will increasingly need mechanical aids to climb a few stairs.
“So, brace for more low-cost, new-look developments like the Cruiser’s hood, because Toyota is reshaping to provide mobility to the biggest block of customers – older people. In fact, I bet my children will no more associate Toyota just with cars than what I associate Toyota just with the very good sewing machines they started out making, and are still making,” he said.
Kalahari cousin perked his ears at this. “You won’t be getting any of those grandchildren standing here sounding clever. Go see if the extra virgin lady is okay. Tell her we are also braaiing the mushrooms we got from the termite mound. That’s mos like a vegetable,” he said.
“It’s vegan dad, not virgin,” sighed his son.
Kalahari cousin just nodded. “That too, son. Now go check that she is happy. You two have a demographic crisis to stave off!”
