Li Shufu Quotes

The hundreds of thousands of men and women at Toyota operations worldwide - including the 172,000 team members and dealers in North America - are among the best in the auto industry.

I believe the auto business is a highly comprehensive and complicated business. It's not that easy for people simply to enter and ruin the whole thing.

There's no doubt that we are, by traditional automotive manufacturing standards, an automotive conglomerate. And so that causes confusion by definition.

I think there could be more experimentation if car companies didn't have to make such huge volumes. If you're making 300,000 vehicles, you have to play it safe. Ultimately, the companies want to make customized cars, and they are all working on ways to do that. Experiments with structural systems are usually about that.

Before 2000, we were unable to design a single car; all the cars were designed in Japan, Europe or somewhere else. We were just converting.

I believe there's still room for the dream a lot of people in the industry have - to design and build your own cars.

We hear a lot about rebuilding Detroit, and we just spent $70 billion to bail out the auto industry - well, they need to be cost competitive, too. If they have high-cost energy, those suppliers are going to move to Japan or Mexico instead of Michigan and Tennessee.

I am at the top of Toyota and drive cars myself. I was also born with this name.

Any car designer always dreams about designing their own car - if they say they don't, they're lying... For me, it was never about starting my own company just to make another car.

The car is the most regulated thing in the world. It's more complicated to make a car than it is to send a rocket to space.

Car technology needs to advance, and the best place for that to happen in is Silicon Valley.

A car designer is really a sculptor.

If you build a Model T and you can see the Camry, you don't spend time tinkering with the T; you go straight to the next thing. Once you build the Camry, you can see the Ferrari, so you go straight to that.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

I come from Denmark; Fisker Automotive comes from California.

There is a lot of development to be done at Toyota. It will be tough in the beginning, but the chances are very good, so that is why I decided on this team in the first place.

I would say that if there is one thing we could have done better in the last 10 years under my watch, is when we launched what we called 'the new car.' It is now called the Gen-5. We just didn't get the collaboration we needed to get from the industry, the owners, the drivers, the engineers and car manufacturers.

I think Detroit is where muscle meets brains.

As a part of the Renault family, I want to develop the car and write new success stories.

The American auto industry is blowing up like a 1976 Ford Pinto.

Chrysler builds great cars.

I love technology - yes, I have fallen in love with older cars, but I'm all for new technology.

Despite global economic concerns, other nations are continuing to push forward and invest in their space capabilities. A U.S. withdrawal from the industry will only allow others to surge in their own capabilities, potentially impacting our national security and technology competitiveness in the future.

In its heyday, the car was an expression of technical flair and design genius: the original Mini, the Beetle, the 2CV, and the Fiat 500 were all, in their various ways, inspired incarnations of functionality.

Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.