Yuji Yokoya supervised the technical divisions assisting Mr. Goto, the former vice president, first as managing director and then as senior managing director.
Since beginning 2011, he has been directing the whole of the R&D activities at Koito as a vice president.
During his trip to Asia, Hector Fratty met him and asked him few questions.
 The 4 LED generations |
DVN: You told last year to DVN that before 2015, Koito will produce LED headlamps with better performances than Xenon at the same price. Do you think you are achieving this target?
Yuji Yokoya: Yes, we made it. The new compact sedan recently announced for North America to be released this year features a single-lamp LED low-beam unit. This unit achieves the same or lower cost than HID and the same or higher performance than HID.
DVN: Koito is the first supplier of LED headlamps in volume (low beam or Low/High beam). How many LED headlamps did you produce until now?
Yuji Yokoya: Since we started the mass production of LED headlamps for Lexus LS600h in 2007, we produced about 2.2 million LED headlamp units (for 15 models) by March 2013.
DVN: ADB or Glare Free High Beam is more and more used in the European lighting industry. Did you launch such a product or when do you expect to launch it?
Yukio Yokoya: Our first glare-free high beams were adopted by the new Lexus LS600h released in October 2012 and have been in mass production ever since. They have been adopted also by Toyota Crown since December 2012. We expect that more and more models will adopt them in the future.