BMW Group - Toyota collaboration speech (Didier Leroy)

Didier Leroy, President and CEO of Toyota Motor Europe and Managing Officer of Toyota Motor Corporation

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, members of the press.

We have been working since April of this year together with our partners at BMW Group, on the contents of this collaboration.

The Supply and Development agreement we signed today for the BMW produced 1.6 and 2.0 litre diesel engines is the first outcome of that work and is one facet of what we expect will be a larger collaboration bringing benefits to both companies and to our customers.

Engineering work is already underway, but we will begin to take supply of the first engines in 2014. And while we are not prepared yet to share with you which models will get the engines, I can say we will be focusing on locally produced products.

At Toyota, we believe that tackling the environmental challenges facing our industry will require more than a single approach. And though hybrid is clearly at the core of our strategy towards sustainable mobility, clean diesel will also play a role.

Particularly in Europe, where customers have come to appreciate diesel, we feel that by continuing to offer a line-up of clean diesels, we can complement our growing range of hybrids as the market evolves. And by working together with an industry leader like BMW, we think we can do this more efficiently, realizing improved scale, reduced development costs and quicker speed to market. It will also allow us to better focus our efforts on leading the advance in hybrid technology.

BMW has demonstrated their expertise in modern diesel technology and we are proud to work with a company that has such an excellent reputation in the market.

Fundamentally we are both engineering companies, so in many aspects we have found that we speak the same language. And it is interesting to see what can be achieved when Japanese engineering meets European engineering and when the cooperation really works.

Going forward, our teams will be working closely together to deliver well-integrated applications of proven BMW diesel technology in a range of Toyota vehicles. And in doing so, I suspect we will both have an opportunity to learn from each other in the way we work.

Of course we will remain competitors, but the collaboration has been excellent so far and will deliver what the partners and the market expect.

This cooperation initiative is also a demonstration of Toyota's new Global Vision in action, with the region playing an increasingly important role in determining and securing local product requirements to the benefit of our customers.

Thank you for your attention.