Double-ENTRY bookkeeping was invented by the Italian Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli. Wow. Now there's a fascinating first sentence.
Fans of the "Da Vinci Code" might remember Pacioli as collaborator and friend of Leonardo, as it was Pacioli who coined the phrase "divine proportion," referring to the transcendent ratio that recurs in Fibonacci sequences, which play a role in the book's mystery, which so totally rips off Umberto Eco I can't stand it.
But I digress.
The point is, double-entry bookkeeping, the bedrock of modern accounting, is a Western European invention, and I'm beginning to think Japanese companies look at the books in a fundamentally different way from Americans and Europeans. Case in point: the new Lexus RX 400h, a luxury SUV with a powerful, efficient and mightily complicated gas-electric hybrid system that must have been obscenely expensive to develop and deploy.
Simply put: Is Toyota (Lexus is the company's premium brand) selling this vehicle at a loss, that is, at less than what it costs to build? When it reaches the market in mid-April, the RX 400h will sell for $4,000 to $5,000 more than a comparably equipped RX 330 upon which it is based; figure around $50,000. As far as I can tell -- and I'm happy to be educated on this point -- that price premium doesn't even cover the cost of the hybrid's 288-volt nickel-metal hydride battery packs, never mind the vehicle's -- count 'em -- three high-efficiency motor/generators, inverters, converters, controllers and assorted gear sets worthy of the innards of a Patek Philippe.
Ask the Lexus execs and they give the punch line of an old joke: How do we do it? Volume! In fact, according to Mark Templin, Lexus' vice president of marketing, the company has already pre-sold 12,000 of the RX 400h vehicles -- almost half the annual allotment headed for the U.S. in the first year -- and the company is trying to figure out how to squeeze more production out of the plant in Kyushu, Japan. Meanwhile, Toyota manufacturing can't meet demand for the Prius hybrid, which has become Tinseltown's talisman of green mojo.
Engineers from rival Japanese car companies have assured me, in alcohol-lubricated fits of competitive anguish, that there is no way -- No way! -- Toyota could be selling the Prius for a profit, and it stands to reason that goes double, or triple, for the RX 400h, which uses a more elaborate version of Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive. For starters, the RX 400h is an all-wheel-drive vehicle, requiring a 68-horsepower motor in the rear that, with the help of a 6.8:1 reduction gear set, imparts a juicy 650 pound-feet of torque to the rear wheels, enough to get the lux-ute from 0 to 60 mph in 7.3 seconds.
