TOKYO >> Shoichiro Toyoda, the chief of the automotive giant Toyota, who led the company as it expanded production into North America in the 1980s and helped transform it into a global brand, died Tuesday. He was 97.

He died from heart failure, Toyota said in a statement.

In a decade at Toyota’s helm, Toyoda marshaled his considerable skills in engineering, management, politics and diplomacy to put the company founded by his father firmly on the path to passing General Motors as the world’s largest automaker.

The accomplishment was all the more impressive because he took charge of Toyota in 1982, at the height of U.S.-Japan trade tensions, when Japanese cars had become a powerful symbol of American fears of a rising Japan replacing the United States as the world’s largest economic power.

Despite those tensions, Toyoda expanded his company’s production into North America, first forming an alliance with General Motors in 1984 before opening the company’s first American plant, in Kentucky, in 1988.

By the end of his tenure, he had expanded production globally, making the company truly international.

After stepping down as Toyota’s CEO, he became in 1994 the head of Japan’s most powerful business lobby, where he helped shape the country’s efforts to fight the economic stagnation that began in the early 1990s.

Shoichiro Toyoda was born Feb. 27, 1925, in Nagoya, an industrial port city in central Japan, the second of four children of Kiichiro and Hatako Toyoda.

His father founded Toyota Motor in 1937, spinning it off from an automatic loom manufacturer started by his father, Sakichi. The “d” in Toyoda had been changed to a “t” in the company name because it looked better when written in Japanese.

In 1950, a debt-racked Toyota split into two companies, one for manufacturing, which Kiichiro Toyoda ran, and the other for sales. Faced with a festering labor dispute, Kiichiro Toyoda was forced to resign, temporarily ending the family’s leadership of the company. He died soon after.

Shoichiro Toyoda joined the company at 27 as director of the inspection department.

He quickly rose up the company’s ranks, partly because of his talent for engineering and business and partly because of his family’s continued influence over the firm. By 1982, when the two halves of the company reunited, he was at the top.

By 1992, when Toyoda stepped down from his role as president to become the company’s chair, Toyota had plants in 22 countries and was competing with its former partner, General Motors, for the title of the world’s largest automaker, which it won in 2008.

Toyoda is survived by his wife, Hiroko, whom he married in 1952, and his son Akio and daughter Atsuko.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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