A couple of hours to the west of Tokyo by train bullet, in the city of Mizunami, an old already closed school offers Japanese automobile manufacturers a very different type of teaching than those received by high school students. The Caseoft engineering company has converted the old educational center into an electric vehicle laboratory. Disassemble the cars that go to the market to study the innovations they contain, as well as their proposals to save costs. Subsequently, this information is sold to competition companies. Where the gym was located, there is something that has Toyota, the main car manufacturer in the world. A signal byd and more than a dozen other electric cars. When comparing its pieces, the most important metric is weight reduction. The lighter the vehicle, the more extra minutes it will win to its autonomy. An example in this race for lightness is the cross car, which sets the steering wheel and the elements of the dashboard while helping to protect the cabin in case of collision. Tesla and Byd, the two main manufacturers of battery models, manufacture 14 pound plastic beams (one pound equals 0.45 kilos), compared to 20 pounds of Toyota's steel pieces. In addition to lighter, they are cheaper and easy to install. This passage from plastic steel can be simple, but only if you have never worked with a gasoline engine. However, if you have spent a lifetime thinking of micromejoras in cars – the Japanese Kaizen philosophy that supports the Toyota or TPS production system consists of a well -known quality management method in the world based on concrete actions , simple and unioneous – the evolution is complicated. «You cannot make Kaizen yourself to move from a vehicle with internal combustion motor to a battery electric vehicle,» warns Ceseoft, Terry Woychowski, former executive of General Motors. «That is the dilemma for Toyota.» The demand for electric cars grows, but not as much as one could expect a few years ago. Therefore, the big figures continue to favor Toyota for the moment, with a range where two thirds of it are combustion models, a third hybrid and only 0.1% electric. This sample has served in 2024 to beat historical rivals such as Volkswagen, Hyundai or GM. In the sector it is estimated that last year the Japanese group sold more than 11 million cars. For comparing with the emerging competitors, Tesla dispatched 1.8 million and Byd 4.3 million (of which 1.8 million were electric) .Akio Toyoda left in 2023 the executive direction of Toyota to Koji Sato, former head of Lexus. Although it is no longer on the front line, the opinion of the now president is the one that counts. And Toyoda, 68, has defended the company's strategy because «has multiple roads», which in practice means the commercialization of hybrids, gasoline vehicles and even cars propelled by hydrogen. At the moment, he is not going badly: the company has not registered losses since 2009 – just before Toyoda assumed the controls – and has overcome different setbacks since then.Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota. GL Archive (Alamy / Cordon Press) in the long term, however, Toyoda's aversion to a fundamental rethinking of the business can limit the company's ability to dream of the records of the future. His TPS philosophy has conditioned Toyota – already its shameless imitators worldwide – to isolate specialized engineers, concentrate on optimizing assembly processes and outsourcing as many components as possible to suppliers outside the company. These measures helped maximize the efficiencies of a mature market such as combustion cars. However, for the dawn of the new technological era they are a ballast.
Personalized pieces
Tesla and Byd, their Chinese rival, have made their factories more modular and smaller cost, while working on the production of pieces. This is partly due to the fact that they are designing new components or combinations that do not exist on the suppliers of the suppliers – a typical electric car has about 11,000 pieces, according to calculations of Goldman Sachs, about two thirds less than its gasoline equivalent— . This tendency towards personalized manufacturing equipment means that those that go up to the electric car, even those that have plenty of liquidity to invest, will be more difficult to simply copy and improve the things that the pioneers discovered. «Unless we adopt a new way of thinking, we can never catch up,» says Shinichi Sasaki, former executive vice president of Toyota and now directs the union of Japanese scientists and engineers. In the old gymnasium of the Mizunami high school Of course, the electric future will require some changes that are unthinkable under the restrictions of Kaizen philosophy and the TPS production model. While other companies hold the battery to the cargo port with a thick copper cable and fasteners, Tesla has reduced the installation time using a rigid aluminum duct. For its part, a piece of byd combines what used to be eight components of the electric motor train in a single module. That includes integrated hardware and software for functions such as battery management and electricity investment – continuous current current transformation. «It's like saying, my mother! These boys manufacture everything,» says Woychowski, president of Caseoft. “They manufacture their own batteries, their engines, their own body, their front and rear front, their headlights, the doors, their console. It is a quantum leap. That is not favored by Kaizen, ”adds. A century ago, Sakichi Toyoda, Akio's great grandfather, invented an automatic loom that could feed more thread and also detect breakfats in the fabric. When Sakichi started the business, its fabric factory, in the center of Nagoya, it worked with coal. At the end of the 1930s, all looms worked with electric motors (which made them more efficient and easy to repair), and Sakichi's son, Kiichiro, used his experience with the assembly chains to found a car company. At the end of the 1950s, the suburb of Nagoya where Toyota had its headquarters to be called Toyota City, and thus began the domination of the global market. During decades, the industry was modernized following the master lines drawn by the Toyoda family, minimizing production lines and concentrating obsessively in reducing costs. There was a time, for example, in which manufacturers used legions of workers to repair the defects of cars after leaving the assembly line. From his first looms, Toyota exported the idea of solving problems as soon as workers detected them, instead of waiting until cars were completely constructed. In 2010, a year after Akio assumed control, Toyota bought a participation 3% in Tesla for 50 million dollars. He sold that shareholding package with a decent gain in 2016, with the argument that he wanted to focus on the manufacture of his own electric vehicles. However, almost a decade later, Tesla is now much more valuable in the stock market (1.2 billion dollars) than its Japanese rival (245,000 million) and the footprint of Toyota electric vehicles is reduced to only three factories that still produce mainly Other types of cars. This has forced Toyota engineers to use some alternative solutions that are not very kaizen. Manufacturing electric cars has very different things to mounting combustion vehicles. To start, factories require much less space and less personal. Toyota automation specialists could find serious difficulties in the development of processes for electric vehicles until the company is committed to building facilities specifically for new designs. The automation manufacturer has also had problems in design and engineering departments. In 2022, the year after presenting his electric BZ4X model, he had to remove thousands of them because the wheels were constantly loosening. The developers had not fully understood how much the electric motors of the cars would generate and used screws that did not support the tension. It was an uncomfortable reminder that Toyota's perfectionist philosophy has not always moved to their cars. The first years of Akio Toyoda in office were characterized by massive withdrawals of vehicles for security reasons that cost millions of dollars, and the US government alleged in 2010 that the defective Toyota could have contributed to the death of almost 100 Americans. Years later, the company admitted having cheated customers and regulators and agreed for falsifying and manipulating vehicle safety data. To make things worse, a series of Toyota subsidiaries and subsidiaries had also admitted to having done so, which caused stops in production while engineers implemented the mandatory certification steps. At a press conference to address the government's reprimand, President Toyoda bowed in apology, the first step for a Japanese executive of a company trapped in a scandal. But the apologies ended as soon as he answered the questions. When a journalist asked him if the debacle meant that Toyota's production philosophy was reaching its limits, Toyoda looked at him coldly and replied: «That is completely wrong.» His team was working hard, he said, using the Kaizen principles to solve any problem that could arise, as he had always done.
Unattainable objectives
Sato's appointment was successful and «acknowledged the need to move on to the next generation,» acknowledges Jeffrey Liker, a professor of industrial engineering at Michigan University and author of The Toyota Way book. It is «a superintelligent engineer, who has a history of achieving challenges that seem impossible.» When he assumed the position in 2023, Sato promised that Toyota would sell 1.5 million electric cars with battery in 2026. At this point, that seems rather A fantasy. But the occasional eyes inside the facilities of Toyota have suggested something similar to a plan. Since its appointment, Sato has supervised billions of dollars in battery production expenses and modernizations of the three part -time Toyota electric vehicles, one in Japan and two in the United States. There is a precedent of Toyota's leadership in This area: the PRIus. Children who grew up in one of them can hardly imagine how radical it was in the late 90s to combine a gasoline engine with an electric motor. Added complications doubled the cost of the propulsion system compared to conventional models and guaranteed that Toyota lost money in each hybrid sold for years. But Hiroshi Okuda, the agitator who was president and then director of Toyota for approximately a decade from the mid -1990s, pressed to spend money on diversifying the technology and the presence of the company. Since then, Okuda has practically disappeared from the official history of the company. He broke ranks by opposing the Toyoda family to take control again. «The Japanese car industry has managed to become a world leader, but now it is on the defensive,» says the former executive director of Nissan Hiroto Saikawa. This article is an edited version that was published in Bloomberg Businessweek and who had the collaboration of Tsuyoshi Unajima and Nicolás Takahashi.