Toyota open to assembly line reformatting as Tesla's 'gigacasting' disrupts car production

author: FutureCar Staff    

At the heart of Toyota Kirloskar Motor's sprawling 432-acre Bidadi factory on the outskirts of Bengaluru, the Japanese carmaker's trademark "milkrun" inbound logistics model is in full flow. The model essentially replicates a traditional version of household milk bottle deliveries – wherein the company organises its key suppliers into clusters based on geographic location, parts are picked up from them by trucks on a "milk route" and then finally delivered via cross-docks to the Toyota plants on a ‘just-in-time' basis to ensure near perfection in synchronising shipment inflows to production schedules.

The model, with its ‘small lots, frequent deliveries' concept, finally culminates on the assembly line, where each of these small parts are progressively integrated into the larger body frame or key components of the car, and has endured for the better part of the last half-a-century as an intrinsic part of the world's largest carmaker's much-vaunted Toyota Production System (TPS). But this part-by-part assembly aggregation model now has an external challenge that threatens to fundamentally upend the way the factory floor processes that Toyota has perfected and other automakers have progressively emulated.

The challenge comes from Tesla, which has pioneered a new simplified and faster way of car-making, specially tuned for assembling battery-powered vehicles. Tesla's chief Elon Musk calls the process "gigacasting", which a senior executive at Toyota's Bidadi plant admitted could pose "a challenge" to the TPS, especially as EVs become more mainstream.

"Toyota's model for building cars has endured over the last half a century, but the Tesla model (gigacasting) could be an alternative, especially for making electric vehicles. While it could be expensive initially, it does seem to offer a more efficient and cost-effective building model in the long run, especially for EVs (electric vehicles)," a senior Toyota Kirloskar executive said at the Bidadi facility, which was opened for a media tour recently. "Given the inherent efficiencies, that (gigacasting) could be the future," he added.

So, what is gigacasting?

On a traditional car factory floor, the vehicle's main body is assembled by welding or bolting together multiple parts of the kind that are delivered to the factory floor (like at Toyota's Bidadi plant by way of the daily milkruns). As opposed to that, gigacasting utilises moulding or casting machines, also known as gigapresses, to force molten aluminium into moulds under extreme pressure to produce large, integrated body parts, such as the entire underbody of a vehicle, in one shot.

Tesla's die cast — or the gigacast, as Musk terms it — visualises the entire underbody of an EV as a single piece, instead of multiple parts bolted and welded together using workers and robots, as is done at most car assembly lines. Musk claims he got the idea when he examined his child's die-cast toy cars. And while there are those still holding out, including a senior Toyota Kirloskar manufacturing function engineer who said that the assembly line of the kind that the Japanese car major runs at its factories worldwide can never run out of traction, given the sheer efficiencies built into the processes, it is a fact that EVs (essentially battery electric vehicles or BEVs) have far fewer components as compared to an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle and are better served with a composite body frame or underbody due to the need for structural integrity, given that the frame has to carry the weight of the batteries. EVs are anyway relatively simpler to build with only about 20 moving parts in the motor-generator assembly against over 2,000 in an internal combustion engine.

And there are indications that others are already converting.

General Motors, for instance, has acquired a little known Michigan-based company called Tooling & Equipment International, which manufactures gigacasting machinery. Prior to GM's acquisition, the company was working with Tesla to improve the latter's vehicle manufacturing techniques. By buying out the gigacasting company, GM has kick-started its own push to make cars more cheaply and efficiently at a time when Tesla is racing to roll out a $25,000 EV, Reuters reported earlier this month. Toyota Motor too has also started work on a prototype gigacasting mould that is being tried out at the automaker's Myochi plant in Nagoya, Japan.

Even before the advent of gigacasting, most carmakers producing EVs in factories earlier used to make internal combustion engine vehicles testified to the need for a reworking of the assembly processes, with serious spillover impacts to their supply chain networks.

Given that EV motors have very few moving parts – they do not require engine oil or transmission fluid, have no exhaust systems, fuel injectors, or starters – the assembly process is far simplified and fewer components translate into lower labour costs. Instead, EV manufacture is focused largely around their heavy battery packs, which are usually placed low on the vehicle floor to improve the centre of gravity and also add to the structural rigidity of the chassis. That's where gigacasting is being seen as a better fit.

Aichi-headquartered Toyota Motor Corp, a pioneer in hybrid technology and a leader in multiple green technologies that include hydrogen fuel cell cars and flex fuel vehicles, is seen as struggling in managing to shift to fully electric BEVs of the kind that Tesla makes. Akio Toyoda, the 67-year-old grandson of the company's founder, who has been a vocal critic of going all-in on BEVs, announced he would step down from his position earlier this year "to advance change at Toyota." Toyota's newly elected CEO, Koji Sato, a former branding chief at group company Lexus, is now in charge of steering Toyota Motor's future and the company has announced plans to introduce 10 new EV models with 1.5 million in electric vehicle sales by 2026. An openness to looking at gigacasting as a potential model, as signalled by the senior executive at Bidadi, could be an indicator of a progressive shift in the outlook towards technologies such as BEVs that Sato has been entrusted with. After selling over 10.5 million vehicles in 2022, Toyota maintained its position as the world's largest automaker over Volkswagen for the third straight year.

In India, Toyota Kirloskar Motor has announced plans to invest Rs 3,300 crore to set up its third plant at Bidadi that will commence production by 2026 and have an annual capacity of 1 lakh units across two shifts. The company's existing facility at Bidadi currently has two units with a combined installed production capacity of up to 3.42 lakh units annually. The new plant will roll out models spanning multiple fuel technologies, including the hybrid Innova HyCross.

(The author's trip to the Bidadi plant was organised by Toyota Kirloskar Motor)

FutureCar Staff