IPs

Toyota believes in continuous innovation and improvement, Kaizen, and is one of the top automobile
manufacturers who register the most patents in a year Toyota engages in active research and
development to accurately identify increasingly diverse and advanced market needs and to provide
high-quality, low-cost, and appealing products to customers around the world. They also regularly give
up patents for other manufacturers to use royalty-free for standardization of technologies over the
industry and also for making new technologies popular, In 2019, they gave up 24000 patents related to
their hybrid technology royalty free for 10 years. They have also given up many patents away for free in
the past, including patents for the nitrous oxide catalytic convertor.

R&D and Innovation in Toyota

They have 20 R&D centers across the globe of which 8 are in Japan. They spent over a trillion yen in R&D
in 2019 and plans to spend more in 2021 despite the pandemic setting back the revenues. The focus is
on bringing out technologies compatible with changing emission standards and leading the way in
intelligent mobility solutions and Hybrid and electric vehicles, they were torchbearers in the hybrid
mobility revolution, and have sold 14 million partially/completely electric vehicles and intend to sell
another 5.5 million electrified vehicles by 2030. Toyota believes that the future of electric mobility is in
FCEV(Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles) rather than in BEV(Battery Electric Vehicles) and is involved in creating
infrastructural facilities such as Hydrogen Stations which will help in rolling out their FCEV range of
vehicles

Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA)

TNGA is Toyota’s initiative to enhance the performance of their cars and leverage their advantages of
scale to implement smart sharing. Toyota produces more than 10, 000,000 cars in a year, it aims to
make their production cheaper by better sharing of man-hours between units and optimizing material
usage by standardization of their various equipment. Powertrain unit (engine, transmission, HEV unit)
development is one of the key focus areas of the TNGA program, Toyota has adopted changes in
fundamental design, from the inputs received from their customers to improve their performance.
TNGA also aims at total optimization by pursuing smart sharing, thereby improving efficiency and
reducing costs.

The introduction of TNGA has helped Toyota in reducing Man-hour expenditures in development by 25%
through grouping development, Capital Expenditures by 25% through equipment standardization and
sharing, and overall vehicle costs by 10% by component structure optimization.

There are now 20 models introduced via the TNGA over the last 5 years.
Toyota Production System (TPS)

TPS was developed keeping in mind two philosophies which are the cornerstones of Toyota as an
organization, JIT (Just in-time) and Jidoka (Loosely Translated as “automation with a human touch”). The
TPS helps to deliver the products in the quickest possible way with minimum wastage, while
continuously innovating to improve the performance of the system.

Some Salient Features of the TPS are:

1. Production instructions are passed to the beginning of the production line as soon as an order is
received
2. The necessary parts are provided to the assembly line to ensure no delays in the assembly line
3. Only the necessary parts are passed on to the next stage of production from the preceding stage
4. Teams meet on a regular basis to brainstorm and innovate to improve the procedure.