The goal is not to produce cars, but happiness. Move Your World previews Toyota's future mobility solutions

If you have visited Toyota Malaysia's website recently, you would've noticed that it now has a new layout, with a new 'Move Your World' tagline. It's a fitting new tagline too, because few other brands can claim to have moved Malaysia, literally, for as long as Toyota.

If roads are fabrics that weave and connect the many different parts of Malaysia, then Toyota cars are the needle threads. At a time when roads were lacking, the Toyota Land Cruiser 20 Series was the first Toyota to be sold here, delivered to a customer in Sabah in 1956, one year before Malaya’s independence.

Even until today, Toyota vehicles are the modern day beasts of burden that drive our economy. Without the Toyota Hilux, no farm produce from Cameron Highlands will reach the market. The Toyota Hiace is the modern-day camel caravan that moves mails, parcels, and goods from faraway warehouses to customers.

Remember when DHL transported the first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines from KLIA to MoH's designated storage area, the vans used were all Toyota Hiaces, because what other make would you trust this important duty with? 

As for moving people, which is the goal of Toyota’s founder Kiichiro Toyoda, the company has a passenger car model to meet every budget and every need – from the entry Vios sedan and Yaris hatchback and Veloz MPV, to a Corolla Cross, Innova, and Fortuner.

Battery electric models are coming too. Petrol, diesel, hybrids, EVs – UMW Toyota's multi-pathway to electrification has got everything covered.

Also read: Pushing carbon neutrality in Asia, Toyota is endurance racing a hydrogen-powered GR Corolla in Thailand this week

But the introduction of battery EVs will also change the way customers of the future buy and use cars. Why take a hire purchase and swallow the associated depreciation when you can sign up for a device subscription plan just like your smartphone or Nespresso machine? Why worry about battery replacement cost when you don’t even own it to begin with?

The Internet and software-centric nature of EVs also opens up new opportunities for personalized services.

Already in Japan, Toyota’s Kinto Factory car subscription service allow customers to personalized the car’s driving character – acceleration, steering, 4WD torque distribution – to the individual customer’s driving style.

Software-centric battery EVs will, in the future, offer even more opportunities for personalized services, including in-car AI assistants that understands your needs much better than today’s smartphones.

But a cleaner, more sustainable city of the future cannot be realized if Toyota is to simply replace its model offerings with battery EV models. Just look at the gridlocked traffic outside your office window and ask yourself what are we solving if we are to replace each of these cars with an EV?

All leading car companies are preparing to transition into a post-car world and had it not for the pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2020 Tokyo Paralympics would’ve been a large-scale demonstration of Toyota’s mobility-for-everyone solutions.

The difference with Toyota is that mobility is not the end goal, producing happiness is. Providing the freedom of mobility we all want is just Toyota's way of producing happiness.

In 2021, Toyota President Akio Toyoda said, "Looking at the 17 Social Development Goals (SDGs) as a set of squares laid out in three rows of six, you will see that the space for the last square is empty. It might be a decidedly arbitrary way of looking at it, but I believe that people’s happiness is the 18th goal.

“I interpret this to mean that only people who seriously strive to realize the (established 17) goals will be able to see a world of the 18th goal.”

From wheelchair-friendly self-driving hydrogen fuel-cell electric buses to battery electric commuters, Toyota wants to make sure that nobody, regardless of their age and health, is left behind.

Toyota even has demonstrated humanoid robots to assist in caring for the elderly, including Human Service Robots that guide wheelchair-bound spectators to their spots, as well as opening water bottles – a task we all take it for granted but is physically impossible for some.

In Japan, Toyota showrooms have been rebranded into Toyota Mobility stores, the first step of Toyota’s move away from being just a car company, into a mobility services company.

For Toyota, there is no point in being the No.1 car company when the car, mankind’s greatest invention to do what our legs (and horses) can’t do, cannot move people who need mobility the most – the elderly and people with special needs who live alone, people with limited means of mobility to get to the hospital for their regular health checkup, or even to work so they can lead an independent life?

Also read: She had an AE86 but could no longer walk after a stroke, until Toyota stepped in

The ability to move further and faster than our legs is one of our earliest memories of a happy moment - our first bicycle ride, our first drive in a car, our first time flying. But this form happiness is not sustainable if we don't solve the problem of how to move people without burning or digging up more finite resources, which is why Toyota is exploring all possible solutions - from battery EVs, to fuel cells to converting existing combustion engines to burn carbon neutral synthetic fuels or hydrogen.

We don’t know exactly how this utopian vision of the future by Toyota will pan out, but we know that UMW Toyota Motor wants to be part of this future, hence it too has switched its namesake brand’s tagline from 'All About The Drive' to 'Move Your World'.

Yes, many of the mobility-enhancing possibilities mentioned above are still years away from the average buyer looking at a Vios or Yaris, but Move Your World will also include some very tangible benefits to today’s customers – simpler financing options, simpler car maintenance, including home delivery are just some examples.

The car is just the hardware that you use, a hardware that buyers can easily compare against cheaper (and sometimes better equipped) rivals. What Toyota wants buyers to find incomparable however, is the happy ownership experience.

In short, Move Your World is aimed to convince customers that when you buy a Toyota, you are paying not just for the car, but you’re entering a lifelong partnership that will see the company taking care of your mobility needs, at every stage of your life, even when the unexpected happens. In the future, Toyota wants to help you move about even when you can no longer drive a car.

“Move Your World is our realisation of a future mobility society, within our push to transition from an automobile company to a mobility company. Car ownership will be more convenient than ever, with delivery to your doorstep, holistic car maintenance assistance services, simpler ownership cost management, and much more. As society becomes more diverse, freedom of choice is increasingly more valuable, which is reflected in Toyota’s new offerings that include carbon-reducing hybrid-electric vehicles, carbon-neutral battery-electric vehicles and performance GR models. We will be announcing further details on these new offerings in 2023, so stay tuned,” said President Ravindran K., at the company’s announcement of its new tagline, at a media event last month.