From Reuters via Yahoo Finance, September 18:
In EV battle, Toyota bets on new technology and old-school thinking
At factories in Japan's industrial heartland, Toyota has turned to self-propelled assembly lines, massive die casting and even old-fashioned hand polishing as it aims to make up for lost ground in battery electric vehicles.
The world's top-selling automaker believes it can close the gap with Tesla and others by combining new technology with the famous lean production methods it has used for decades to wring inefficiency, including excess costs, out of manufacturing.
The automaker gave a glimpse of its latest advances at a plant tour in central Japan last week, some for the first time. It also showed off examples of thrifty ingenuity, such as a technique to make high-gloss bumpers without any paint. The mold is hand polished to a mirror finish, giving the bumper its lustre.
Elsewhere, three-decade-old equipment used to process parts can now be run at night and on weekends after being automated through robotics and 3D modeling, improvements Toyota said had trebled equipment productivity.
"The strength of Toyota's manufacturing lies in our ability to respond to changing times," Chief Product Officer Kazuaki Shingo told reporters on the tour.
He pointed to engineering and technology expertise anchored in "TPS", shorthand for the Toyota Production System.
Toyota revolutionised modern manufacturing with its system of lean production, just-in-time delivery and "kanban" workflow organisation. Its methods have since been adopted everywhere from hospitals to software firms and studied widely in business schools and boardrooms around the world.
The relentless focus on continuous improvement and squeezing costs helped fuel Toyota's ascent from post-war upstart to global giant. But in battery EVs, it has been eclipsed by another tireless innovator, Tesla, which has used efficiencies of its own to build market-leading profitability.
Under new CEO Koji Sato, Toyota in June announced an ambitious plan to ramp up battery EVs, a big shift after years of criticism that the maker of the industry-leading hybrid Prius was slow to embrace fully electric technology.
The Japanese automaker accounted for only about 0.3% of the global EV market in 2022, Goldman Sachs said in June, calling a stronger offering the "missing piece" in its lineup.
It is not the only car company grappling with the challenges from shifting to EVs. Detroit's Big Three automakers have cited competitive pressure from Tesla as they push back against wage demands from the United Auto Workers union that last week led to an unprecedented simultaneous strike.
ASSEMBLY LINE, GIGACASTING...
....MUCH MORE
Related:
August 2022Toyota Decides To Electrify and Goes Big
But something changed and I'm not sure what it was. They are still pursuing fuel cells but in the last week the Government of Japan and the company have used some very big numbers.
If interested see also June 7 on battery electric vehicles:
"Toyota’s Skunkworks Chief “Incredibly Optimistic” on Climate"
....For Toyota, we’ve announced that 35 percent of our production is going to be BEVs within the next eight years—by 2030. This is incredibly fast and a very, very high percentage of our production, but it’s not 100 percent. So what’s the other 65 percent going to be? When we look at the actual impact in terms of lifetime emissions for the entire life cycle of a car, there are other alternatives which are almost as good, but are actually practical sooner. And that includes PHEVs [plug-in hybrid electric vehicles], which have both a battery and an engine in them. They act like a BEV over shorter distances, roughly 40 miles or so for the models we have now. And that means that you get most of the advantages of a BEV, but you’re not as dependent on the charging network for longer trips. Even HEVs [hybrid electric vehicles] have substantial carbon reductions. And then, of course, there are fuel-cell vehicles, too.....
We last mentioned Toyota in July when CMA CGN joined the CEO-and-above pressure group The Hydrogen Council:
These are not the little guys.
The new co-chair is Takeshi Uchiyamada, Chairman of Toyota ($275 billion revenue).
He joins Benoît Potier Chair and CEO of Air Liquide ($26 billion revs.) who has been co-chair since 2017.Uchiyamada and his lieutenant Mr. Toyoda run one of the few organizations that can command greater automotive resources than Elon Musk.
Which may set up an interesting confrontation as Mr. Musk is on record as saying hydrogen fuel cells are "mind-bogglingly stupid."
He's also called them “incredibly dumb” and “fool cells.”
*January 2023
"Report: Japan's 'hydrogen society' policy 'has clearly been a complete failure'" (TM; TSLA)
Tesla was the first automaker to go large with the gigapresses:
"Tesla's Margins? Thank Gigapresses (TSLA)"
And with Ford and now Toyota following suit, Elon is trying to stay ahead of the competition with the next innovation. From Technology.org, September 15:
Tesla Aims to ‘Gigacast’ the Underbody of Its EVs as a Single Piece
Tesla has achieved a significant technological breakthrough that could revolutionize its electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing process. Now, the company is nearly ready to die-cast – or gigacast, as Elon Musk calls it – nearly the entire underbody of its EVs as a single piece.
Tesla originally introduced the concept of “gigacasting” by utilizing massive presses with clamping pressures ranging from 6,000 to 9,000 tons to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y. This innovative approach substantially lowered production costs, placing other automakers in a race to catch up.
To further solidify its lead, Tesla is now on the brink of a groundbreaking development that would enable the die casting of nearly the entire complex underbody of an EV as a single piece. This stands in stark contrast to traditional cars, which require approximately 400 individual parts for the underbody.
This gigacasting expertise forms a critical component of Tesla’s “unboxed” manufacturing strategy, unveiled by CEO Elon Musk in March. It is a cornerstone of Musk’s plan to produce tens of millions of more affordable EVs in the next decade while maintaining profitability....
....MUCH MORE
From what I understand, Mr. Musk also runs a few other businesses.
I'm still working on a to-do list for last week.