TOYOTA Motor president Akio Toyoda (right) delivers a speech in front of the company’s next-generation hybrid vehicle Prius while special guest, baseball star Ichiro Suzuki who plays for the Miami Marlins in major league baseball, looks on during a press briefing at the Tokyo Motor Show. AFP
YOU MIGHT easily dismiss Toyota’s use of the phrase “Toyota’s New Generation Architecture” as something small made up to look like something big, but you would be wrong.
It isn’t just the reworking of a single component or portion such as compression or forced induction, and making it all look sexy. TNGA (their acronym for the new system) is actually a very holistic look into and an adjustment of how their whole process works.
Just like “the Toyota Way” is about many little things building together into bigger and better things—and perhaps more importantly better processes and better thinking—TNGA is a pretty major rethink of how they want to do business.
At the core of TNGA is a relatively simply stated goal: ever-better car production. Better cars for the consumers. Better lives for people, too.
Akio Toyoda, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp., related the story of his grandfather and Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda, who, after seeing his mother working hard on a loom machine straight into the night, said to himself that he wanted to make her life better and then went on to do so.
That “making things better” is the simple part; how to do it is the complex part.
The complexities in the case of TNGA involve many levels of change. It works with the entire design process, realigning workflow and giving key business areas more freedom to make decisions.
For example, chief engineers, who Toyota considers in closest proximity to their consumers in the whole process, will have their authority strengthened.
Basically, they are looking at building cars with the consumer and their well-being first and foremost in mind.
They will be concentrating on improving the quality and performance of all components, with the increased costs of this offset by the use of these parts in wider applications.
They will also be paying particular attention to those parts that will be model-specific, so they act as true differentiating components.
You could consider this as an “economies of scale” production change, except for the fact that it is really focused on the human and not the financial.
It is actually arguable that the only reason a large and drastic organizational change is possible is because Toyota has the war chest to afford it, and that they are thinking very long term.
They want to change the most basic components of the vehicle in order to make it better from the ground up—in some cases quite literally.
They want to lower the center of gravity, for example, which will improve handling.
They want to strengthen frame and chassis, and improve suspensions. In the case of the new fuel cell Mirai, the design has a significantly low roll center as well as a significantly more rigid body; the result is quite easily felt when you try and twist the car through some curves.
Perhaps the car most indicative of this new set of changes will be the Prius, to be released later this year.
The hybrid was designed for efficiency, economy and ecological health, so we should see a clear distinction in terms of how changes such as center of gravity and roll center were accomplished and how effective they may be.
Toyota will be redesigning and reworking just about everything: new engines, new transmissions, new hybrids and, in the case of the Mirai, new fuel sources.
Their stated aims are to have their new internal combustion powertrains increase fuel efficiency by 25 percent, improve drive performance by around 15 percent, and the hybrids to improve efficiency by at least 15 percent.
All this will be accomplished with a multipronged approach utilizing technologies such as clean-burning Atkinson combustion cycles and redesigned intake ports that swirl the air-fuel mixture to allow more rapid combustion.
Higher compression ratios will also be used, and the variable valve timing system will be improved.
Basically all this will require much more coordination and communication, and much more work. Departments more used to working relatively independently will now be accessing knowledge from others earlier on, all with the end result being an improved component or system that is flexible enough to be used in different vehicles.
Motoo Kamiya, project general manager at the TNGA planning division, said this new drive “will engage the entire company in structural reform.” They want to build better cars, make customers happy, and generally exceed all expectations.
When Toyota said a few years back that they were going to put the excitement back in their products, many thought they were talking about more visually striking cars or, with the racecar-driving Toyoda at the helm, more involvement in motorsport.
All that is true, but all that is merely part of the whole. As Kamiya very clearly put it, Toyota wants to produce cars that catch you at first sight, cars that you immediately want for your own. Then they want you to enjoy driving so much, make the experience so pleasurable, that you don’t want to stop.
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