Customer Reviews

Lexus: The Relentless Pursuit

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This is a great manufacturing love story in which Toyota, an automaker clearly in love with its product, decides to go after the U.S. luxury car buyer, a suitor who has repeatedly ignored its advances. To get America's attention, Toyota must first re-invent itself. It must make itself more handsome (through better styling), improve its physique (be faster, stronger and need less maintenance) and prove its financial management skill (by selling great cars for less). Because time is fleeting and the buyer has many other suitors (Mercedes Benz, Jaguar, Nissan, Volvo), Toyota must work fast before its intended lover makes an irrevocable decision and buys someone else's car. Like some other love stories, this is repetitive and suffers from some plain old sloppy editing. But it makes you want to test-drive a Lexus to see what causes such a sensation. We recommend this book to CEOs and sales and marketing executives who dream of producing revolutionary, successful products for the global marketplace. And who would mind getting a little consumer love?

This book is a must read for anyone interested Lexus or how to run a quality business.

The book accounts for the actual life of the Lexus Brand and Lexus projects, since the beginning with the strong leadership of one of the best Toyota Chief Engineer to the up and downs in the market. If you are a Toyota fan you will discover that also Toyota can fail; the difference is in how Toyota learn by its own failures and comes back.

Only really of interest if you want to understand how japan thought through the process. It certainly an interesting road to travel

The book was an interesting background to the development of the first Lexus and the Japanese 'way' but needed some sharper editing.

While an amazing task to create a new car make from the ground up, it was a stark contrast to see how close it came to not happening at all. A chief Engineer who sounds like a slavedriver, USA based staff being shot down at every turn.

Only downside to the book is that i found it put a gloss of perfection on the make, though even the author had to note the struggles once MB and BMW caught back up in terms of price and technology. Lexus makes one heck of a fine product, but they didn't go an invent a flying car or anything.