Hero

The Road Warrior
HIROSHI OKUDA Hiroshi Okuda, the chairman of Toyota, envisioned the need for a hybrid car long before history demanded it. In the 1990s, at a time when oil prices were hitting rock bottom and America's SUV market was exploding, Okuda greenlighted the engine technology that would usher in an era of fuel-efficient -- and eventually zero-emission -- cars.
Today there are more than 350,000 Priuses on the road worldwide, and other automakers are racing to catch up with the 350 patents Toyota holds on gas-electric hybrids. "When it comes to perfecting the killer app of hybrid technology," says Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "Okuda is the Bill Gates of the auto world."
Six feet tall and a black belt in judo, Okuda likes to break the rules. To encourage youthful innovation, he promotes younger employees to managerial roles. He has dismissed American carmakers as "stupid." And in June, to help Japan meet its climate targets under the Kyoto Protocol, he sauntered down a Tokyo catwalk in a lightweight suit, sans tie, his shirt collar unbuttoned down to midchest. It was a fashion statement almost as scandalous as an emperor with no clothes: Formal business attire is to Japanese executives as shitkickers are to Texas oilmen. But Okuda, an outspoken climate crusader at age seventy-two, was promoting Japan's emerging "cool biz" movement, modeling lighter suits that could alleviate the need for air conditioning in office buildings.
For all his showmanship, Okuda is dead serious when it comes to the fight against global warming. "People and countries simply will no longer allow autos to damage their living environments or the Earth's ecosystems," says Okuda, who has worked at Toyota for fifty years. The Prius "embodies this spirit," he adds, contributing to the company's "growth in the moral dimension."
Okuda, a serious reader who ranges from political memoirs to Goethe, selected the name Prius because it means "to go before" in Latin -- signifying "a forerunner to the twenty-first century and to the era when automobile technologies become highly diverse." Hybrid technology is already setting the stage for the future: Building on the system used in the Prius, Toyota has developed a prototype, the FCHV, that runs on hydrogen-fuel cells.