More insights that could explain what Toyota is up against at this stage of the global EV market (esp in China) cc:
@BornAgainEcoWarrior @Padrino @Splendid Systems
Personally, I would love Toyota/Lexus to succeed globally in EVs (as I've had some wonderful ICE Toyota/Lexus cars in the past), but the harsh reality is that they face massive challenges (both internally as company), and externally. Only time will tell.
"But this excellent Bloomberg Businessweek
story goes much deeper into detail about how Toyota is trying to catch up to new construction methods in the EV era—and whether it even can. In fact, it's probably the best story I've read on this subject yet. A subscription may be required, but it is worth a read in full.
Here's one excerpt, highlighting a seemingly anodyne part of any car:
the 20-pound steel cross-bar at the front of the vehicle.
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’s a change that sounds so simple once you hear it, and intuitive, perhaps, if you’ve never dealt with a gas engine.
If you’ve spent a lifetime thinking in terms of micro-improvements—the core of kaizen, the philosophy that underpins the Toyota Production System, or TPS—it’s an insight that might well prove elusive.
'You cannot kaizen yourself from an ICE vehicle to a BEV'; says Caresoft President Terry Woychowski, a former General Motors Co. executive. ;
That is the dilemma for Toyota.'
Now apply that lesson to the entire car. You see the problem here?
What Tesla pioneered, and what Chinese automakers have run with, is a clean-sheet, top-to-bottom reset of how a car is built from the ground up—not with decades of carmaking tradition behind it but starting with the idea of a profitable battery-powered vehicle and going from there.
That's essential because batteries are expensive and they will be for some time.
So in order to actually make money on EVs, automakers have to streamline, cut costs and reinvent in other ways.
This is part of why so many new EVs in particular just have screens and very few buttons. And so much is now made in-house, which runs counter to decades of outsourcing to countless third-party supplier companies.
As that story notes, a clean-sheet reinvention of everything isn't how Toyota's 'kaizen,' or continuous improvement of existing systems, is supposed to work. Nor is it how Toyota has trained generations of engineers, product planners and businesspeople around the world.
And that's a system copied by nearly every other automaker out there;
it is why Toyota's being singled out here. It's the company that taught the world how to make modern cars, and now modern cars are increasingly built in a different way. (This is also why Ford is doing its 'skunkworks' EV project, although the status of that is anyone's guess lately.)
Toyota clearly isn't taking this lying down.
Chairman Akio Toyoda balked at the idea that the Toyota Production System and 'kaizen' cannot figure out the future:
When a reporter asked whether the debacle meant Toyota’s production philosophy was butting up against its limits, Toyoda fixed him with a cold stare and replied, 'That’s completely wrong.' His team was hard at work, he said, using kaizen principles to resolve whatever problems might be at issue, just as it always had.
[...] 'Japan’s automobile industry has been able to become a global leader, but now it’s on the defensive,' says former Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa.
'It’s not very good at fundamentally rethinking things and learning from that. But no other country has such a deep bench of engineers of such quality. With an open mind to learning, they will still be able to do very well.'
Now, I took issue with some of that story, including an unfair dredging up of Toyota's recall crisis in the 2010s or saying Toyoda has an ;aversion to a fundamental rethink of the family business'; the dude was just out there at CES showing off a city of the future and investing in space travel.
Everything I've seen indicates Toyota is serious about the future of mobility. It even reports that Toyota engineers are already using 'some very un-kaizen workarounds' to make the bZ4X better.
But the point is this: it's no longer about just competing with Tesla.
It's now about the Chinese auto industry that's far bigger than any on earth and has a dozen Teslas waiting in the wings to steal Toyota's market share globally.
And the machine that changed the world can't figure that out, everyone else is cooked too."
