Toyota getting inspiration from Volkswagen
Mitsuhisa Kato – vice president of Toyota – has recently confessed that his brand has lately pursued volume as opposed to quality while insisting that the new Toyota New Global Architecture Plan – TNGA – will fix those issues while at the same time saving up to thirty percent in overall production and development costs.
The main goal of the TNGA is to decrease both the costs as well as the development time while also allowing for more time to focus on quality testing. Kato-san also said that the new architecture plan has to make all Toyotas more compelling and fun to drive.
He continued to say that Toyota has to make products more attractive because for its entire history the company has been using an individual approach to good car making. As a result, along with the expansion of production volume came issues related to product appeal, competition, price appeal, development resources and supply chain.
He said that Toyota is now ‘trying to do a Volkswagen’, referring to the German carmaker’s focus on platform-sharing between models, and said that the TNGA is more focused on consolidating the supplier base and development procedures between models.
As an example of TNGA’s aim of standardizing the components across different models, the vice president talked about the sharing of a single driver’s hip-point between models means that it will allow for the development of other shared systems
Another example he used was the fact that alternator plugs are different for every Toyota model and as a result these too will now be standardized to a global standard so that the supplier base and the development team can reduce the costs by producing only one part.
Kato-san has also explained that the centre of gravity of future models under TNGA will be lowered in order to help with the dynamics of the model so that they also fit in with Toyota’s president aim of making every future model fun to drive.
