Toyota’s legendary production system helped it climb from a post-war upstart to a global giant. But it’s been eclipsed in battery electric vehicles by the tireless innovation of Tesla (TSLA.O). The world’s top-selling automaker believes it can close that gap with new technology and old-school thinking.
At factories in Japan’s industrial heartland, engineers work on self-propelled assembly lines that drive themselves through manufacturing, eliminating the need for conveyor belts and considerably cutting upfront plant investment. They also allow for much more flexibility in line layouts and in extending or reducing them quickly when production shifts between different models or when a new feature is introduced.
Workers at the Motomachi plant in Tokyo showed off one such line: sensors guide an EV through the factory by moving floor mats. It allows for more flexible workstations, as a robot arm lowers car seats into an EV bed or other components are placed on the vehicle.
In the case of the giga casting, a single piece of metal can replace 33 parts that have been welded together in current models. The result is a rear section that is just as structurally sound but half the weight and cost. And the time it takes to replace a mold can be cut to 20 minutes, Toyota says, versus 24 hours.
The automaker is also working on a battery that will improve the cruising range by 20%, reduce costs by 40%, and charge to 80% complete in 30 minutes or less. That effort, which will take longer to commercialize than the battery it sells as a performance version of the Prius, is being accelerated for use in BEVs.
Toyota is also looking at boosting productivity with thrifty ingenuity, such as using high-gloss bumpers that don’t need paint because the mold is hand-polished to create an extremely smooth surface. Its workers have also found ways to squeeze more out of existing equipment, using 3D modeling to tweak the design of a machine and introducing automation that has trebled production efficiency.
A tour of another facility in the town of Myochi revealed how Toyota uses an ancient casting technique to produce massive parts used across many vehicles. The company has created a machine that uses melted aluminum under 4,000 tons of pressure to cast large parts such as car frames and engine blocks. That results in huge savings because it eliminates the need to assemble smaller parts into a larger whole and can be used over again instead of starting from scratch.
The company also uses Siemens’ industrial edge computing platform, Industrial Edge, to help predict problems in the manufacturing process. That, in turn, enables workers to make faster and better decisions about how to fix any issues. It’s an example of how the automaker is applying modern technology to its famed production methods to get a leg up on Tesla and others as it battles for a share of the growing market for battery EVs.
