Toyota’s founder, Sakichi Toyoda, started his company not by building cars but by building a better loom. Specifically, he built a loom that could sense when the fabric broke so the workers could stop production until someone fixed the problem. This concept is built into the fabric of Toyota’s successful car production and has been copied by the rest of the industry. Is it also why Toyota hasn’t built a good EV yet?
I try to mix up the sources in The Morning Dump because I like to give a broad view of the industry, but today I’m going to start with two Bloomberg pieces I think are nicely complimentary. One is a Bloomberg Businessweek feature on Toyota’s challenges in trying to build an EV. The other one focuses on Volkswagen’s similar troubles.
Where the two companies differ is in North America. Toyota’s problem is usually not having enough cars to meet demand and Volkswagen usually has the opposite problem. Both will be susceptible to credit availability for consumers, though, as mixed data means we’re probably in for more uncertainty as the year starts.
Tesla is an established automaker at this point, even if its processes differ from its competition. Another way that Tesla is different is its CEO, who manages to get in the news more often for things having nothing to do with his car company. This week it’s a last-minute SEC lawsuit alleging that Musk was underhanded in trying to purchase Twitter.
‘You Cannot Kaizen Yourself From An ICE Vehicle To A BEV’
The quote above is from former GM Exec Terry Woychowski, whose current job is working for a Munro-like company called Caresoft. The company buys vehicles, takes them apart in an old Japanese junior high school, and gives advice to automakers on how to improve systems and parts.
It’s part of this big Bloomberg Businessweek feature you should read, but I’m going to excerpt a little section here that I thought was important:
[C]onsider one component: Toyota part #55330-42410, a 20-pound steel bar, known by engineers as a cross-car beam. The beam holds the steering wheel and dashboard instruments in place and helps protect the cabin during a collision.
This part is inside the bZ4X, the Toyota brand’s only global, mass-market fully electric car, because it’s of a tried-and-true design used in countless other models. Today’s standard cross-car beam is the product of incremental improvements made across decades, and most versions of it have wound up under the hoods of internal combustion cars. This is a testament to the Toyota Production System, which continuously refines even the tiniest details of individual auto parts. Over untold iterations, the beam has been designed to keep the vibrations of an internal combustion engine from making their way to the passengers.
But electric motors don’t vibrate, and steel is heavy. These are among the reasons why Tesla Inc. and BYD Co., the top makers of battery-electric vehicles, manufacture similar beams out of plastic. Theirs weigh only about 14 pounds, according to Caresoft, and they’re cheaper and easier to install, too.
It seems obvious, and it is, but the company’s Toyota Production System philosophy is baked into that one part. Here’s how Toyota describes kaizen:
The English translation is, broadly speaking, continuous improvement. ‘Kai’ means ‘change’ and ‘zen’ means ‘for the better’. It is a philosophy that helps to ensure maximum quality, the elimination of waste, and improvements in efficiency, both in terms of equipment and work procedures.
Within the Toyota Production System, Kaizen humanises the workplace, empowering individual members to identify areas for improvement and suggest practical solutions.
This way of doing things, industrially, has been mimicked and adopted by almost every other automaker and plenty of non-automakers. It’s not exactly “lean manufacturing” but shares many of the same principles. There was a time when Japanese production efficiency scared Western automakers. Now it’s China and Tesla’s turn to advance industrial thinking.
Building an electric car is not like building any other car. Lucid’s CEO Peter Rawlinson, who also helped develop the Tesla Model S, has made this point many times. It requires a complete rethink because there are a lot of systems you need for gas-powered cars you don’t need for EVs, and vice-versa. Additionally, Toyota and other automakers rely heavily on suppliers for many common parts, but that means losing some of the secret sauce.
Here’s a clip above from the Fully Charged podcast, where Ford CEO Jim Farley talks about how there are 150 modules and semiconductors in one car with software written in different languages because it’s been bid out to different suppliers.
“The problem is the software is all written by 150 different companies and they don’t talk to each other. Even though it says Ford on the front, I actually have to go to Bosch to get permission to change the seat control software,” Farley explains. Even worse, none of this is Ford’s intellectual property.
Ford, for its part, has seen the writing on the wall and scrapped most of its next-gen EV products and focused on a skunkworks project in California that isn’t beholden to Ford’s old ways of thinking. Toyota? Not quite. The company’s BZ4X is a mediocre product and it’s not clear Toyota is going to dramatically change how it builds cars. It’s hard to argue with Toyota because, thus far, its reticence to invest in EVs has made it enormously profitable.
This isn’t to say that EV automakers have it all figured out, as they’ve had to learn how to make cars, often the hard way. Rivian made a simple mistake in ordering a single part and it set production significantly in 2024. Tesla customers have long complained about paint issues with the company’s cars (there’s even a Facebook group dedicated to this).
The question, as stated above, is whether or not iterative production can help you make a better electric car.
Volkswagen Will Have No New EVs This Year
Oof. That’s the only way to put it. Oof. Trying to build production electric cars has been difficult for Volkswagen, with issues ranging from software woes to the door handles on the ID.4. Because of this, the Volkswagen brand itself will have no new electric car models this year anywhere in the world.
The affordable ID.2all for Europe isn’t coming out until 2026, and the company’s key VW-Xpeng SUV for China is also not scheduled to go on sale until next year. The new Scouts, in the United States, aren’t coming to 2027. We did get the ID. Buzz, which technically went on sale last year, but is basically new this year. Also, see Jason’s ID.Buzz review for a better understanding of why that’s not likely to save the company.
Here’s the money quote from a Bloomberg story on VW’s issues:
“For the next year or so, VW is forced to sell old technology to new customers,” said Matthias Schmidt, an automotive analyst based near Hamburg. “That’s going to be difficult.”
Damn, Michael Kors, that’s harsh.
It’s a weird situation for Volkswagen to be in, because it needs to sell more electric cars and, yet, its current electric cars aren’t that great or that popular. Here’s another harsh-yet-true analyst quote:
“The main issue with VW is the product,” said Stephen Reitman, an analyst at Bernstein. “They have this production capacity for battery-electric vehicles that people aren’t buying.”
Volkswagen still sells a bunch of profitable cars, so it’s likely better the company takes a beat to align product with demand than it is to try and suddenly force a bunch of ID.4s and ID.7s on customers.
Credit Is Looser, But The Future Is Mixed
Viewed merely from the perspective of automakers, it would be excellent if we were in a zero-interest rate environment. Having low interest rates and a supply shortage during the pandemic meant that automakers could sell cars for high prices and help customers afford them by giving them somewhat artificially low car payments (over long terms).
Now, there are plenty of cars in production, but credit availability became a lot tougher as governments raised rates in response to inflation. This credit-tightening from 2023 into 2024, it’s widely assumed, caused people to delay buying cars.
According to Cox Automotive’s/Dealertrack Credit Availability Index, credit was more available in December, with the All-Loans Index hitting 95.5, which is the best credit access since March 2023. What’s driving this change?
Approval rates are up, which makes sense now that yield spreads narrowed. Overall, auto loan rates have dropped by 175 basis points since March of this year. Loan terms are also improving, slightly, with 72-month loans becoming less popular/necessary. The number of loans that came in with negative equity dropped by 120 basis points, but were still up year-over-year (the same with subprime loans).
What should we make of this? Here’s what Cox says:
The December Dealertrack Credit Availability Index illustrates mixed results in credit access for auto loans. Consumers benefited significantly from tightening yield spread, higher approval rates and more favorable loan rates, which played critical roles in pushing the index slightly upward. Meanwhile, the persistence of certain tightening factors – like shorter loan terms, higher down payments, and a reduced share of subprime loans – was not enough to reverse the loosening trend.
For consumers, this means better borrowing conditions and easier access to auto financing, particularly when purchasing used vehicles from franchised dealers. Lenders are also navigating a mixed environment as credit demand intersects with loosening policies for credit unions and auto-focused finance companies but tightening at banks and captives.
It’s assumed that more cuts are coming from the Fed, though the economy remains stubbornly hot, with employment strong. The Fed wants to get to the semi-mythical “neutral rate” that keeps people employed and inflation stable. It doesn’t feel like we’re there yet.
The SEC Claims In Lawsuit That Elon Musk Acquired Twitter In Underhanded Fashion
The Federal Government is basically in garbage time, with the Republicans having prevailed and various departments looking at President Trump and Elon Musk’s incoming DOGE commission and trying to do as much as possible before Monday.
That includes a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission against Elon Musk. Here’s how CNBC explains it:
Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, purchased Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and changed the name to X the following year. Prior to the acquisition, he’d built up a position in the company of greater than 5%, which would’ve required disclosing his holdings to the public within 10 calendar days of reaching that threshold.
According to the SEC’s civil complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Musk was more than 10 days late in reporting that material information, “allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his financial beneficial ownership report was due.” Investors may have bid up the stock had they known about Musk’s purchases and interest in the company.
This is a strange one. As soon as Musk disclosed his purchase of Twitter the stock did go up 27%, as the SEC points out. The government claims that delaying his filing by 11 days while he accrued stock in the underperforming company allowed him to underpay shareholders by $150 million.
Musk himself has called this “lawfare” and his lawyer calls it “ticky tack.” It’s been a few years, but I don’t think it was a secret that Musk wanted to buy Twitter (now X) at the time. I remember him frequently threatening to do so in order to free the company from what he considered political influence and an overwhelming preponderance of bots. Glad he fixed all that…
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
I hope to keep writing The Morning Dump for many moons, so I’ve selected “What They Do” from The Roots because “Illadelph Halflife” is probably where you should enter The Roots if you haven’t listened to them before. It’s not my favorite album, that would be “Things Fall Apart.” It’s not the one I’ve listened to the most, which is probably “Phrenology.” It’s the classic, though, and it doesn’t make sense if you don’t start with this album. Later, when I have time, I have a story about The Roots that involves organic vodka and a lot of fresh fruit. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.
The Big Question
Which traditional automaker will end up being the biggest maker of electric cars in 10 years?
Lead photo: Toyota
BYD, same as now.
Isn’t every car company selling cars based on old tech? In fact unless it is a ground up new vehicle it is old tech. The only thing necessary is for it to be new tech to the purchasing customer. Best example Stellantis
my sense is that the bloomberg author has conflated TPS & DFX. TPS at its core is a systematic elimination of waste (remember TIM WOODS), usually process-centric. “design” is not in the index of Shingo’s “little green book”
the example of the cross-beam is a DFX or value engineering failure, not a TPs issue. (DFX, design for x; x = manufacturability, maintenance, reliability, cost, whatever the business decides is important).
if it had gone thru VE, they would’ve quantified how much force the cross-beam needs to withstand and realized it was too big.
When I was working for a series of tech startups and start up like projects at established companies, my advice on new projects was something like this:
Procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate, getting an early start just means that when you finish the project half of it will be obsolete.
Once you have waited till the last possible moment, divide the problem up into small pieces with as many of them being solved problems and the rest of the pieces being glue to stick the solved problems together. Actually this can be folded into the procrastination stage.
Make sure that all of the proposed pieces are easily replaceable by something else without requiring the project as a whole to be redesigned. If some sub project scenes particularly problematic, maybe have two different solutions developed in parallel in case one of them doesn’t work.
Put together a team to do the actual work, making sure that there is no one person that would jeopardize the project if they dropped dead.
I get the impression that Toyota is in the procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate stage. Note that this worked well for Apple until Apple tried to design a car.
VW just went ass backwards designing and giving us a product without really understanding the customer. Jason’s article went into this but they give us an EV van with pitiful range when they should have just given us the hybrid California in the first place which would have fit our current tastes perfectly. Hybrid, camper (vanlife) minivan would have been great.
We are in the transition period between ICE and EV’s. During this period, legacy automakers are going to lean on their past and try to reuse as much as possible. This is a logical approach to this transition.
It won’t be sustainable, but is a necessary step between ICE and EV. These 20lb bars were always going to be changed once they realized it. To me, this is SOP.
Looking back at the transition from horse to ICE, many of the first ICE’s literally took a carriage and put a motor on it. It took 20 years of this before they converged on the “classic” ICE layout. The “classic” EV layout is still being figured out, and I predict at least another 10 years before the designs settle down and become more iterative in the way the industry had been designing prior (which is okay and a normal way of working).
My business education from the late 90s was one of those “maxmimum outsourcing just in time GIT R DONE!” ethics that Apple, Tesla, and Covid all slightly undermined in their own special ways. It definitely requires a little rethinking, that’s for sure.
OTOH, VW was somehow able to get Bosch to create a module that allowed Dieselgate, so in a really macabre way, I still have hope that outsourcing can get the job done!
Also, I’d like to yell at that cloud that cars have too many electronics.
The biggest EV company in 10 years is probably gonna be started by a kid who is currenly 17 years old and using a Raspberry Pi to build models in Python or something.
I am latching on to this prediction 100%. The car will also be 3d printed and the electronics will all be connected with jumper wires.
The all-new 2033 Skibidi Sigma Gyatt now available for preorder!*
*Deal not available in Ohio
At one point I knew all the slang words. I got older, and didn’t know a lot of them, but still looked them up to see what I was missing. A few years after thatI was finally old enough to no longer have to give a shit. I have no idea what this means, I will never know what this means, and I’m completely at peace with that.
“Which traditional automaker will end up being the biggest maker of electric cars in 10 years?”
Morgan.
Lots of people have lost a lot of money betting against Toyota over the years. Kaizen & TPS still help it to be one of the strongest learning organizations in the world. The fact that they’re learning from ICE and the unfortunate bZ4x puts them a step behind Tesla/BYD/even GM & Ford… right now. No one else in the space has proven they’re able to learn & apply improvements faster and with more success. They may not be #1 by volume in 10 years, but they’ll be far from defunct.
“20-pound steel bar, known by engineers as a cross-car beam. The beam holds the steering wheel and dashboard instruments in place and helps protect the cabin during a collision.”
Cool, so you can replace this 20lb chunk of structural steel with 14lb of plastic with no other changes to the structure because “electric motors don’t vibrate”?
EVs still have to pass side impact testing, and NVH on EVs is a nightmare because the ICE isn’t grumbling away masking all the other noises. A cheap, light, plastic cross-car beam is definitely having some load taken off it by making the rest of the car stiffer.
Engineering is all about compromises, and saving mass and cost somewhere usually adds it back in somewhere else.
With my cynical hat on I’d say this seems like an isolated example plucked out of the data to promote the sale of this data to OEMs, rather than an example of Toyota’s “inability”to build EVs.
However, there are struggles out there. Fun anecdote from an OEM meeting to discuss the EV replacement of an existing ICE vehicle: someone from supply chain insisted that we carry over an expensively tooled component completely unchanged so we could benefit from economy of scale and keep the part price low for the new car.
That component was the fuel tank.
Any plans to add a REX to that model?
You know what seats are not reliant on proprietary software? Manual seats.
To me this thinking screams what was wrong with COVID auto production.
CEO: ‘We’re having chip shortages, what do we do?
Sensible employee: ‘Produce car variants that use less chips like ones with manual seats, manual mirrors, hand crank windows, etc.?
CEO: ‘WRONG YOU IDIOT! WE JUST PRODUCE THE HIGH END MODELS AND TELL PEOPLE WE’LL FIX THEM IN POST WHEN THEY ORDER SOMETHING WE DON’T HAVE THE CHIPS FOR!’
The chip shortages should have been a renaissance for basic automobiles and higher end automobiles with basic, reliable interiors. I order base models because I want the cheapest option. I order them because I want the mechanical interior. It’s why I ordered the SR M3 back in the day before they pulled a bait and switch and changed it to a software limited SR+ M3, I would have rather bought a LR RWD M3 with the manual interior but Tesla only ever ‘offered’ it for the SR M3, and even then they never made it.
Why do power seats even require software? It’s electric motors, wiring, and switches, they’ve been around since at least the 1950s and have functioned the same from the user’s perspective the entire time, why do they suddenly require dedicated computers to work?
Memory seats and possibly, if present in the seat, airbag deployment.
Yeah, I haven’t listened but seat control doesn’t necessarily mean powered seat. Airbags are almost certainly related because of occupant detection, position of the seat and the weight of the passenger. And seatbelts too, might be a different supplier still but then Bosch would likely have to work in tandem. Especially now that basically every seat in car has a sensor to know if it’s occupied and thus ding if the passenger needs to be buckled.
Honestly fair point. My guess is that it’s a cost and feature issue. Seat memory, automatically backing up when the car is parked, etc.
*I don’t order base models because I want the cheapest option. I order them because I want the mechanical interior.
DAMN THE TIME LIMITED EDIT FUNCTION!
I, for one, DO welcome the base model because it is the cheapest option!
I hardly agree with you although I have to admit that my experience with wind up windows and electric windows has been that electric windows in the last 20 years are vastly more reliable than the crank up windows. Sure a little dab of grease fixes the wind up windows but you have to take the whole goddamn door apart to get there so you don’t and then they break.
Power outside mirrors are kind of necessary because they put the mirrors beyond your reach.
Power seats on the other hand are an abomination, and what decadent moron came up with the idea of powered rear hatches on SUVs. My God those things suck.
Personally I’ve had way more electric windows break on me than crank windows, also no reason why we can’t have a grease fitting in the middle of the crank to top up the grease and push the old grease out.
For me as someone who is the only person who drives their cars, I set my mirrors once and never touch them again unless I decide to tow a trailer, so minor inconvenience once in exchange for something that has an obscenely lower likelihood of failing is worth it to me.
Yup, and yeah I forgot about power hatches, they suck so damn much.
Mirrors and windows aren’t really affected by the chip shortage, parts tied to them sometimes like blind spot monitors or heated or memory settings. Designing for crank windows is more work and resources than just making power windows standard. With something power locks it’s easier to just leave the lock assembly out. I’ve actually run into lock actuator issues more than I’ve ever had an issue with power windows or seats. But I also would not buy a 4-door car without power locks.
And frankly most buyers do want a power seat.
They are if they have ‘smart’ functions.
I understand why automakers standardized on electric windows, however in a time when you’re not certain you can survive, and chips are the factor limiting your production, I think that calls for drastic adaptation to use an absolute minimum of chips per vehicle.
I don’t want a power seat. When I need to adjust it in any way it takes forever, the adjustments are so fine that when it is moved to a position other than my default position I have to spend a lot more time getting my seat just right. With my mechanical seat adjustments I know exactly how many notches forward and how many notches back to get my seat to it’s optimal position. Hell, it cars like the Merkur XR4TI you got your standard big mechanical seat adjustments, and mechanical knobs for your finer seat adjustments. The fine adjustment of electric seats, with the speed, reliability, and durability of mechanical seats.
I feel like it’s going to be a Chinese company, 10 years from now is(maybe) 6 years into a new US presidency, and some turnover in Congress, so the banning of “China” may soften by then, also China may have employers clean up their acts a little more to give less reasons for the tariffs/embargos by then, especially for the bigger EV makers that start shaking out of the massive number of current makes they have.
They’ll still be spying but we’re all already walking around with Chinese made phones in our pockets, or at least the TikToks loaded on to them so meh to that.
I don’t figure on a US company as they’re already rolling back now, if they undo the rollback that’ll take a few years so they won’t be leader in 10 years. Tesla by then the Model S will be a 22 year old design, it’ll be the Crown Victoria of EVs, but also if Musk hasn’t left for Mars by then he’ll have steered them to be more AI/Robots/Robotaxi or what not and less about the cars.
If Toyota wants to unlearn how to make cars they should talk to Stellantis. They’ve forgotten more about making cars than anybody.
In ten years Toyota will be EV king among legacy automakers. They may launch slow, but they implement fast and once they’re firmly established on the EV path, kaizen will rule again.
The stupid GM exec quote is so stupid. Kaizen isn’t specific to ICE production, it’s a method for anything. Apply it correctly and it works. IDK what I expect from a GM exec, I guess.
“Unlearn”? So they have to forget how to make ICE cars? I would have gone with “Relearn”.
How did Elon Musk get so much richer than he was when he was born?
Now we know.
Wealthy people don’t have to play by the rules when they steal from their lessers. Anyone trying to enforce rules on wealthy people are just being petty.
Besides, they’re always trying to enforce these so-called “rules” after the fact. Who cares about what happened yesterday? It’s today now, and everything worked out fine.
I would add “/s” to my post, but sadly, this really is how things work in today’s conservative dominated world.
Y’know if Jesus actually did come back, this problem would solve itself.
I’ll never not get a kick out of the fact that Jesus was a socialist brown person. Conservatives and completely missing the point go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
It may be helpful to think of kaizen as “continuous improvement”.
It’s really more about evolution, not revolution, and it is very useful for refining and honing a relatively mature product and/or process. Many aggregated small tweaks will result in a stronger overall result.
Which – as indicated – isn’t super helpful when the product itself is in significant flux. That should be the domain of the (metaphorical) clean-sheet-of-paper engineers.
Overall I think Toyota’s strong position with their hybrids will allow them to work through their initial EV offerings until they have a refined product. They have a large amount of dedicated owners already enjoying their hybrids, waiting for both charging infrastructure and EV tech to mature before they make the jump to a full EV. Toyota does not need to go all-in and jeopardize their business with massive EV investments and research when other companies have been angling to be the first movers in this space. When Toyota brings a competent EV to market it will sell very well.
This is sort of an impossible question. The tech just has to change over the course of a decade. It’s like asking which company is going to sell the most wooden butter churns, 4 years before it all went mechanical.
As for The Roots, man they have a great catalog. Their career is like no other group in history. Legitimate respect in the industry for the talent, and no blowback for “selling out” to Jimmy Fallon. They just keep collecting checks. More power to ’em.
10 years from now, I think VW takes the crown as the biggest maker of electric cars. They are failing forward in their path to electrification and learning a lot of hard lessons in the process. The partnership with Rivian and launching the Scout brand shows that they are capable of learning. When VW takes the crown as the biggest, my guess is that they will be a smaller company than they are today.
I don’t see Tesla or BYD carrying their current momentum for that long. They will still be big global players, but they won’t be at the top.
10 years from now, I expect Toyota to be in rough shape. Not Nissan bad, more like Ford before Alan Mulally.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the answer to today’s question winds up being Toyota? The actual biggest maker of EVs in 10 years is almost surely going to be one of the bigger current Chinese EV manufacturers, but can any of them be considered a ‘traditional’ automaker? Yeah, I’m going with Toyota just because. Time to set the reminder for 10 years from now to check back in on this.
P.S. I dearly hope Autopian is still around doing it’s thing in 10 years for many reasons, one of which would be revisiting this type of question to see how things actually turned out.
I think the bZ4X sucks because it’s a stopgap. Toyota needed to get an EV out there and they built one with their traditional method and parts from their other vehicles. I don’t think it’s a good representation of what a Toyota EV can be because it’s going to be a while until they’ve created one from the ground up. The Kaizen system as Toyota does it takes a long time, even when updating existing vehicles. Think back to how long it took them to create a new 4Runner platform…
I think the fact that bZ4x stinks as bad as it does can be a good thing for Toyota. In the short term, they can easily push buyers to their many hybrids and PHEVs that fit many folks’ use cases just fine. Then in the meantime they get to go through the bZ4x car’s full life cycle and get tons of data about what went right and what went wrong, as well as looking at what the competition is having success or struggles with. Then they can introduce those improvements and efficiencies on a later platform that they actually want to sell at volume.
Exactly my thoughts.
The bZ4X isn’t the result of Kaizen. It’s one step of the Kaizen process.
The process will continue with a better offering in the future.
Which traditional automaker will end up being the biggest maker of electric cars in 10 years?
I won’t be surprised to end up very wrong on this but right now it really looks like GM is going to do it. Unless they pull the rug out from underneath themselves like they are known to do.
They’ve released a solid portfolio this (wait… last) year, but also laid off hundreds of engineers and spent a bunch of their profit (from not paying said engineers) on stock buybacks. So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them trailing in a few years when the Silverado hasn’t sold (because it’s too expensive), the new Bolt they promised never launched, and the Equinox and Blazer are overdue for a refresh.
IMO, US companies that continue to invest more in stock buybacks than R&D will never be truly competitive. (See Boeing).
Counterpoint; US companies that continue to invest more in stock buybacks than R&D will provide dividends to the shareholder in the short term, thus ensuring the long term security of the company. /s
Sorry to be Boring Corporate Lady but I disagree on the Kaizen thing. Tools like 5 Whys and a philosophy of getting input from as many people as possible seem like they would help in this situation. EVs allow for a fresh perspective on every system in the vehicle and digging deep into “why is it this way in an ICE vehicle?” seems like a good start to identifying what can change for an EV. It might take longer, but it also SHOULD result in a better end product.
Re: the big question. BYD seems like the easiest answer here.
Totally agree.
Focusing on the incremental improvement of one part is such a narrow-minded and silly way to understand the kaizen and the TPS.
Bingo – it is so much more than just that well publicized aspect.
Agree, industrial maintenance engineer for 25+ years. The iterative process will not get the big breakthrough, but will refine everything over time resulting in an optimized better overall product. It is not a failure of “Kaizen” that now such a fundamental component as a cross body beam warrants a complete rethink. The key is to focus on the fundamentals, something that many have given the startups a pass on. Toyota is the benchmark for a reason.
The Kaizen thing will totally work for EVs, and it will work even better. Why? Fewer parts. Simply put, if you can see it, you can imagine how it might be better. With an ICE, so many parts are buried “inside”. While an EV has many of those parts visible. Perhaps a bad take on my part, but I think it will yeild good feedback.
Also, much of those previously mechanical parts in an ICE are now software or semiconductors. Software is easy to iterate, but the semiconductor may be much slower to iterate then the parts of an ICE due to having to update masks and exist within the semiconductor manufacturing process, which is LONG. Meanwhile, we noticed that there was a burr on the leading edge of a bearing pocket for the IMS bearing. We can very quickly mitigate that issue (once it’s identified, which is another issue altogether.)
You know what you don’t really hear from Toyota very often? Hot takes. The company just makes good cars people want to buy and makes a good profit on each one. When the masses want an electric car, it’ll probably have a very good one to offer them.
Yet, software types and domestic automaker execs just babble like this on and on and on. Been doing it since the 1970s.
I swear there has to be an inverse relationship between the Hot Take brigade who can’t shut up and people who just quietly and competently do things.
Quiet competency is a severely underrated virtue.
Ya know, a lot of people said similar things about GM in the early 70s around small cars… Toyota is having some teething issues across the board, and let’s face it, by the time people “want” e-cars, they might have lost too much market share… kind of like GM.
The difference is that when GM put out small cars in the 70s-80s, they were half-assed and well behind the competition.
If Toyota does the same with EVs over the long haul (not just one BZ4X) then I’ll believe they’re in danger of losing their spot.
I’m not sure I agree. When the whole EV push started in the industry, Toyota sat back and said “Hybrids are our focus”. They then spent like 2 or 3 years being ridiculed by nearly every auto journalist in the industry. That seems like a pretty hot take from Toyota.
A while back there were a lot of news articles about Toyota’s research on solid state batteries.
I imagine they’re busy at work quietly developing an electric car that’ll just work and do everything their current models do.
They’re out selling hybrids while the charging infrastructure grows and charging standards are being established. And when the dust settles they’ll release the bev that lets people make a seamless transition.
I’ve built my entire career off of quiet competence. One of my favorite mottos is “speak softly and haul ass”. You don’t have to talk a big game if the results speak for themselves. I think A LOT of people would benefit greatly from this realization but then again one of the small handful of things I’m genuinely good at would be commonplace so let’s just keep it to ourselves, shall we?
The loom for the LFA’s A pillar is one of my favorite Toyota things.
Looms are like the thing they started with, the Toyota logo is a needle and thread while the Lexus spindle grill is modeled after a literal spindle
Toyota Industries is still a major global textile machinery manufacturer (and also still manufactures auto parts and assembles complete cars under contract to Toyota Motor Corp)