Hall of Fame #3: Toyota Century

Today I welcome the first non-US contribution to the Hall of Fame. You may have noticed that I prefer to tout American accomplishments, but far be it from me to marginalize any great nation, and Japan is truly one of the greatest. The story today is a heartwarming one. Toyota, the automotive equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge or unseasoned lentils, the company that killed off every fun car that it had during the 1990s, shows us that it has a heart buried deep within. Because there are actually two Toyotas, not just one.

Two Toyotas

In the year 2007, Toyota broke a 77-year winning streak when they overtook General Motors as the world's largest automaker. The recall issues and certain quality concerns, not to mention the loss of production associated with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, have proved enormous hurdles. And yet, Toyota broke a winning streak so long that the only longer one you'll find is in the virtually non-competitive America's Cup of yachting, and as of 2012 Toyota is still on top of the world.

But the cars that made Toyota #1 are not the cars that I want to buy. The Camry and Corolla are offensively bland and thoroughly uninspired to drive, look at, and think about. They have added comfort and quietness where previous small cars were rattly and skateboard-like. In so doing, they have made Americans in particular snobby dullards. Just when we were making some progress in the 70s and 80s in small cars, Toyota comes along and allows Americans to enjoy couches on wheels just like they did before the oil crisis, albeit with nonexistent styling, and high fuel economy and reliability to keep them top sellers. Soulless appliances all, I promise you that not one person, in Japan or America or elsewhere, has ever dreamed a daring thought or done anything exciting or noteworthy while in the process of designing or assembling a Toyota Camry. They sacrificed everything noteworthy about it so that it could sell globally, and give nothing offensive or exciting to buyers of any country.

And that's all well and good if you think of a car as an expensive device that is a practical necessity. Notwithstanding the 10 million cars that they recently recalled, Toyota will still assemble you a perfectly suitable A-to-B machine that should prove reliable and economical. This is the Toyota with which you are familiar. If the name didn't sound Japanese, and it was more generic (like Quality Motors Ltd), you might think it was Korean, or Chinese, or Russian, or even American. There are no culturally identifying cues.

What about the good old days? What if you want a Japanese car that is thoroughly Japanese, something Japanese enough that the Emperor would be chauffeured in one? Something that is not the product of ruthless accounting, a global market philosophy, and California stylists? Something that is not a hybrid of cultures, but goes back to the days when a Japanese car was made for Japan's tastes and these alone? Something of this sort could skirt the precipice of boring appliance and turn into an interesting cultural study as well as a machine that is classy, elegant, and understated. There is a second Toyota, not a globalist cash machine, but one that is interested in serving the enthusiasts of Old World luxury.

There are two Toyotas. The second of these continues to cater to the needs of Japan's traditional luxury car buyers. This part of Toyota makes the only Toyota I would ever consider owning: the Century.

The Toyota Century entered production in 1967 and at the time of its launch, it was not unique as a large Japanese luxury car. The Mitsubishi Debonair in 1964 had started the ball rolling, and the 1965 Nissan President was even better. Nissan, furthermore, was given the tremendous privilege of building the cars for the Royal Household in 1966-1967. The Nissan Prince Royals (six total) were replaced only in 1997, and by this time the Toyota Century was the obvious choice.

However, both the President and the Debonair were available with many engine options, spanning from 2.0L four-pots all the way through inline-6s and a V8 at Nissan. These cars were conservatively styled and pushed all the same buttons, but except for top-line V8 Presidents, they don't have the class as the Century. If the Century was in production at the time that the Royal Family needed to replace their creaky old Rolls-Royce and prewar Mercs, I think it would have gotten the nod.

Let's look at the production history. The Debonair was killed off in 1998, the year after the Century got a refresh that it retains to this day. The President lasted all the way to 2010, but with a measly 4.5 L V8 compared to the Century's absolutely bespoke 5.0 L V12, it's a two-pair against a straight flush. 

Right off the bat, it was exclusive; the Century was V8-only from 1967 until 1997. There was only one engine offered at a time. After a 30-year production run with virtually no changes, they overhauled the design and relaunched it with a V12 engine. Let me cite the superlatives: The first and only V12 from Toyota. The first and only V12 from any Japanese manufacturer. The only V12 still in production for smoothness only, sacrificing power and fuel economy at the same time.

Why is the Century so good?

• It's not made like any other Japanese car

I know, it says Toyota on the badge, but it's not made by Toyota's factories. As productive and innovative as Toyota has been over the years, and as much respect as is warranted to them, something more special is required for a true luxury car.

1967 Toyota Century

Toyota also owns a subsidiary Kanto Auto Works, Ltd. In Japanese style of the time, it was an independent contractor but did all of its work producing Toyotas (the Japanese did not yet practice vertical integration in the automotive field). As of 2012, Kanto is wholly owned by Toyota and was merged with two other contractors, losing its name in the process. Still, the Yokosuka plant which makes the Century is not the same as other Toyotas are built upon.

The cars are largely hand-made at the plant in Yokosuka. The metal for the bodywork is polished before paint even goes onto it. They use substantially more mass of paint; it's comparable to old-school Mercedes-Benz back in the days when those were made like tanks. Kanto Auto Works build every Century to order, so it will be personally yours. At this price point, it's pretty uncommon to see that.

1997 Toyota Century

It's also been utterly unchanged in appearance from 1967 to the present day. Don't believe me? Just try and spot the difference. 1997 was the year of the last redesign. You are looking at a car that you can still buy new today.

Let me give you an analog of developments in Europe, which may be more familiar to American readers. Mercedes-Benz was once, many years ago, merely a specialist luxury car company which sold cars in the hundreds. It fully reinvented itself starting in the 1960s to become a mainstream brand that was known and respected throughout the world, with sales in the millions. On the other hand, Bentley and Rolls-Royce did not modernize and expand in the same way. The Rolls-Royce Phantom is mostly handmade in England by craftsmen who spend 150 hours of labor per vehicle; even if demand were to suddenly skyrocket, they could not ramp up production to meet it. The R-Rs are also substantially more expensive than Mercedes-Benz cars, except the most expensive from that brand. If you'll permit the comparison, Lexus is the Mercedes-Benz of Japan, while the Toyota Century is that country's Rolls-Royce.

• Its name is both sensible and honorable

Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930)

Century has always used English lettering on the trunk

In America, a multi-brand strategy was essential for the Japanese to conquer new markets. But in Japan it wasn't this way; Toyota is perfectly elastic and it runs the gamut from the tiniest econoboxes to large barges like this. In Japan, Lexus does not exist, and there are merely upscale Toyotas to fill the void. Excellent, I say! Why invent a new brand for your luxury car? Sakichi Toyoda is far from as much of a celebrity as Henry Ford or Soichiro Honda, but he was an influential industrialist in Japanese history nonetheless. This model is called the "Century" because it began production in 1967, exactly one hundred years after the birth of the founder. That is sensible; it brings to mind the prewar designation of Japanese military equipment by the number of years that the current Emperor had been reigning. 

Century is a venerable name for cars. Before Buick ruined the name on a dull FWD midsize, the prewar 1936 Buick Century was quite a special car, using the big Buick straight-8 in a smaller sedan body to give it a top speed of 100 mph (hence the name "century" for 100). That was very fast for a luxury car in the 1930s. Buicks of the time were very well-built cars and Buick engineers were among the most fiercely independent of all the GM staff. The 1950s Century, when it returned, repeated the formula of Buick's most powerful V8 engine in a lighter body, making it an extremely good performer.

• It is as conservative as a 2600-year-old monarchy

There is no shortage of choice for full-size executive cars. In this field already, its similarly-priced competitors include the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7-Series, Jaguar XJ, Audi A8, Lexus LS, and I suppose we'll throw in the Volvo S80 and Cadillac XTS for completeness.

The Century has every single one of these vehicles beat when it comes to care and quality of assembly. The aforementioned vehicles are made on largely conventional production lines and cannot be said to be basically hand-made, which can be said about the Century. If you want comparable production methods, you would have to go a few rungs up the ladder and compare it to a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Bentley Mulsanne, or Maybach 62 (no longer in production). Those cars are all above $300,000, so the Toyota Century, under half that price, possesses a certain amount of value. It is a traditionally craftsman-made car with no embellishment over its name and heritage, and for a fair price.

A total of four Century Royals were produced for the Imperial Household Agency. The changes included stretching the wheelbase, adding granite entry steps to the rear passenger compartment, and including Japanese rice paper headlining for the passengers. It is assumed that some additional armor and security measures are in place, but as for US Presidential vehicles, the details have been kept secret.

Toyota Century Royal for the Imperial Household

The target market for the Century, apart from its obvious appeal to the Royal Family and Japanese dignitaries because its inimitable Japanese-ness, is for hardworking executives who have worked for the greatest part of their lives towards honest prosperity. The literature surrounding the car states that "the Century is acquired through persistent work, the sort that is done in a plain but formal suit."

The Toyota Century is usually ordered in exactly the way that preserves this modesty intact. It is typically equipped with lace curtains instead of tinted windows for the backseat passengers. The curtains provide privacy more thoroughly than tinted windows, and are believed to generate less attention. Leather usually means luxury to an American, but to a Japanese buyer the soft creak of the leather seating surface breaks the complete silence that might otherwise be enjoyed, and the smell of leather is not usually considered pleasant to Japanese tastes. The seats in a Century are consequently usually ordered in wool cloth. Colors are theoretically unlimited, because the factory will make any color the buyer requests, but in practice the buyer never intentionally defiles his or her Century with a gaudy paint job, and sticks to conservative black or gray on the outside, with royal blue, black, burgundy, or dark brown interior colors.

There are modern luxury touches, of course. It has massage seats, it has reclining rear seats, and the designers have shown a certain amount of obsessiveness in making the door handles electric, so that the opening of the door has no vulgar mechanical clunk. Thereafter, the doors can be pushed gently to ajar, and the electric motors in the doors will pull them the rest of the way silently.

It's the sort of car so dignified that the chauffeur would avert his eyes when opening the car for the passenger. The Japanese used to believe that their Emperor was God incarnate. If there is a car that is fit for a representative of God on Earth, from a Japanese perspective, the Toyota Century is the obvious choice.

• It has a V12 just for the sake of it

Toyota's sales forecast for the Century never exceeds 200 units per month. Bentley sells more than that! It is almost never exported outside Japan except for their embassies and ambassadors abroad. Their introduction of a V12 engine as a Century exclusive is absolutely jarring. It is unheard of for a mainstream manufacturer to put such lavish investment in a small-selling halo car except for short periods, but Toyota seems committed to indefinite production of the Century as a matter of honor.

1GZ-FE mounted in a Toyota Century

The engine's technical name is 1GZ-FE. It's a 4996cc 48-valve DOHC V12. It was given two ECUs which can each operate on one bank independently, so even if there is a complete failure of one of the banks, the engine can still operate as a straight-6. At the time of the 1997 introduction of this engine, there was an ongoing gentlemen's agreement among all Japanese manufacturers not to quote any of their engines as having more than 276 hp, regardless of what its actual output is. The Century followed in this tradition and was quoted at 276 hp, although for export they revised it to 300 hp, which is considered closer to the "true" value, most likely about 310 hp. It is blessed with ample torque, 481 Nm at peak, with over 400 Nm available at idle. That's the good kind of torque, the effortless and instantly available kind. A well-designed V12 has inherent primary and secondary engine balance that cannot be achieved with a V8. Compared to bigger Mercedes-Benz V12s, the Toyota engine is not very powerful, but that's not why you'd buy this car. You're just going for buttery smoothness, and the big Century delivers.

If you would like to know more technical details about the engine, may I direct you to an excellent article by Philip Bradshaw from New Zealand.

There is a certain old Lexus LS commercial that shows a large stack of champagne glasses on the hood of a Lexus as it accelerates on a dynamometer. The engine is so smooth and the gear changes so unnoticeable that the glasses are not perturbed at all. I would very much like to see how a Century V12 would fare. In fact, you could stack them directly on top of the engine and I bet it would do just as well. But this is an academic question, since Century buyers probably do not care to see such silly, vulgar stunts.

Toyota shows it has a soul deep down. They must have known they would never break even on the development costs of the V12 unless it was amortized among more car lines. They must have done a cost analysis and figured out that it didn't make good business sense unless the car was priced in the Rolls-Royce realm, making it a largely unreachable aspiration for the honest, persistent businessmen in plain but formal suits. And yet it was not made more expensive. It is not so stratospherically expensive that few could aspire to own one. To buy one in dollars would cost approximately $110,000. It is somewhat more expensive than a Lexus LS600h, and less expensive than many Mercedes-Benzes.

Toyota developed a lovely, smooth, docile, unique V12 just for this vehicle so as to retain its pride as Japan's most coveted state vehicle. And while it's expensive, they did not price it into the realm of fantasy. It's downright patriotic.

• It is the anti-Lexus... from the folks who brought you Lexus

Japan's automakers started off with cheap offerings in the US, but as they gained acceptance, they sought to turn their compact owners into buyers who would be happy to grow into Japanese luxury car buyers.

The problem is that luxury cars are very rare in Japanese history. There was very little motorization in Japan before WWII and it was broadly agreed that cars were not a necessity for civilians. The American oversight of Japan's recovery in the period 1946-1955 reversed this trend completely, and Japan started motorization from the bottom upwards. They did not start, as in Europe and the United States, with a handful of craftsmen producing very expensive cars for the wealthy of their country and across the world. They had basically a fresh start after WWII. Japan started the 1950s with a large demand for cheap, efficient personal transportation. It was originally met with motorbikes, but as the prosperity grew, the Japanese people started to demand cars at all levels of income. But at the top, the wealthy had few choices of true luxury vehicles unless they imported something from outside Japan.

If we ignore the Century and its ilk (and for now we will) the Japanese did not mount a mainstream offensive in the export luxury market until the 1980s. They realized that a multi-brand approach, as had been pioneered by GM and others, was superior to having all models under one brand. But they also did not want to push Japanese culture in their cars, and they thought that the President and Century would simply not sell in the US. So with that in mind, Honda launched Acura and Toyota launched Lexus. Nissan followed suit with Infiniti. The smaller brands like Mazda could not afford to create an entirely new division, but it did try to match the large car segment with its ill-fated 929. With the game changed, and Americans and the rest of the world ready to buy Japanese cars at all levels of the market, Mazda and other single-brand stalwarts like Suzuki and Subaru fell behind their diversified Japanese competitors as the US and larger world market for Japanese cars grew in the 1990s and beyond. 

Speaking nothing about the engineering excellence of these luxury brands, I take issue with the very names they have. Acura means nothing; it is an invented word and the criteria they used to invent it were shady marketing tricks. Likewise, Lexus was a meaningless name created simply because it sounds prosperous and slick to an upper-middle class American businessman. The innate luxury of a Lexus springs from technology only, and its heritage is as fake and cynical as a hooker's smile. You pay for something that really wants you to like it and be satisfied, but you are not a part of anything greater. No piece of history was ever written by a Lexus. It was a car planned by greedy businessmen using a Powerpoint presentation, with huge dollops of fake enthusiasm, and it was worked into production by indifferent assemblers who had no particular attachment to the Lexus brand. The existence of Lexus is a wound to car fanatics who like to think that our particular field of interest is unsullied by such crass examples of soulless consumerism. I laud Lexus for its impressive engineering, but as a brand I could never warm up to it.

If you buy a Century in preference to a Lexus, you are not trying to show off your wealth, but you are enjoying it nevertheless. A Century will get you noticed, but from a smaller section of the population, and mainly by those who appreciate quality and value. I mean value in a traditional sense implying that spending as much as one can afford to get the finest work of an expert craftsman is superior to skimping and buying a subpar product. I don't mean value in the vulgar sense of simply being cheap compared to competitors. In that field, a Lexus is somewhat better value, and really a full-spec Toyota Camry should be best. But neither of those are special, and the Century is.

Hall of Fame inclusion criteria

It is uncommon that I want to give a shout-out to vehicles or other pieces of technology that are still in current production. But, if you've been following, the Hall of Fame main criterion is that this must be under-appreciated, and the Century definitely is. You may not want to import one, you might say it's ridiculous that anyone would. You can say it's ugly if you don't have an eye for old classics, you can say it's outdated and the dash looks like a 1985 Mercury Grand Marquis. You can say all that stuff, but this is a special vehicle that is out of the ordinary and it deserves your respect. For how much effort goes into building it, is worth every yen. It's a reminder that Japan wasn't always so obsessed with tech that they forgot the philosophical experience of car ownership. When this thing goes out of production, it will be a very sad day for the state of the world's motor industry, even if it is not reported by news agencies outside Japan.