Toyota Motor Corp.'s incoming president, Akio Toyoda, has a sobering message for the giant company founded by his grandfather: It has gotten too fancy for its own good...

He is expected to focus, most of all, on abandoning kakushin, or "revolutionary change," current president Katsuaki Watanabe's term for changing the way Toyota designed its cars and factories. It spawned technological advances, but led to cars that were often costlier to produce.

The 52-year-old Mr. Toyoda is also working to fix a pricing strategy that put the company at odds with some U.S. dealers, who felt its cars were getting too expensive, according to people familiar with the situation. ...

Mr. Toyoda blames more than the recession, according to people familiar with the matter. He is sending the message that his predecessors worsened the problem by straying from core ideas of thrift and efficiency.

Among other things, there's a move away from technologically sophisticated in-car gizmos like a solar-powered cooling system designed for the new Prius. ...

Akio Toyoda has long preached a traditional Toyota practice called genchi genbutsu, a leadership maxim that boils down to get out of your office and visit the source of the problem. For the past year, Mr. Toyoda has been practicing genchi genbutsu to quietly collect evidence that the company had strayed, according to people familiar with the situation. ...

They say he was particularly concerned that Messrs. (Katsuaki) Watanabe and (Mitsuo) Kino____a placed strong emphasis on achieving two trillion yen in annual operating profit, a level it passed in the year ended March 2007. ... Driven by that profit objective, Toyota executives reasoned American consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a Toyota -- a change from a long-held strategy of pricing cars at a value. ...

Cliff Cummings, a veteran southern California dealer, warned Mr. Toyoda over a steak dinner with a dozen other dealers last March that premium pricing was the wrong way to go. Toyota had built an image of sturdy affordability, "but now they were wrecking it," Mr. Cummings says he told Mr. Toyoda.

Based on subsequent conversations with the younger Mr. Toyoda and other executives, Mr. Cummings says he expects the company to overhaul its pricing strategy."