Reuters
In EV battle, Toyota bets on new technology and old-school thinking
At factories in Japan’s industrial heartland, Toyota has turned to self-propelled assembly lines, massive die casting and even old-fashioned hand polishing as it aims to make up for lost ground in battery electric vehicles. The world’s top-selling automaker believes it can close the gap with Tesla and others by combining new technology with the famous lean production methods it has used for decades to wring inefficiency, including excess costs, out of manufacturing. Elsewhere, three-decade-old equipment used to process parts can now be run at night and on weekends after being automated through robotics and 3D modeling, improvements Toyota said had trebled equipment productivity.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
