Why the engineers of the world’s number one brand were surprised to disassemble a Tesla

Almost a year ago, a spy photographer detected a Ferrari SF90 Stradaleone of three plug-in hybrid models from the Italian sports car brand, enter and exit the Lamborghini factory, with different drivers behind the wheel and for several consecutive days. A few months later, on Ferrari’s private test track, in Fiorano, the opposite situation occurred, because it was possible to observe a demanding test session of a Lamborghini Hurricane STOthat they had equipped with a good number of sensors to collect dynamic data.

This is not a new practice, but quite common, is known as reverse engineeringand this is the best way for any manufacturer to know in detail the qualities of the competitive products, especially when there is new technology such as electric power to apply to vehicles that have always been powered by conventional engines.

Sometimes they are only observed in detail, sometimes dynamic tests are carried out, as the two examples from Lamborghini and Ferrari seem to have been, but other times it is a matter of completely scrapping a car to even study its structure.

This is the case of Toyota, the number one company in sales in the world, which despite this leadership, is steeped in a key moment for its medium and long-term futurein which e-mobility will feature much more prominently in its product offering compared to what is happening now.

Since April of this year, Akio Toyoda, grandson of company founder, to step down as CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation Make room for Koji Sato, owner of Lexuswhose priority is to develop the electric mobility Of the brand. And since part of that plan is to study the scene in detail, it looks like they took the quickest route possible, taking a Tesla Model Y, the best-selling car of the North American brandand they completely stripped it for further study, according to Automotive News.

When last year GlobeLiveMedia interviewed in Miami for Alex Shen, Head of Design at CALTY Design Researchthe advanced study of Toyota and Lexus for new projects, one of the premises with which this company was created in 1973 was “go see”, that is to say “go and observe”, to develop cars based on knowledge of the market and consumers. This is how Lexus was born as a premium car brand in the United States, to compete with Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, the big three in Detroit.

The concept is the same, and although it might now be called “see and improve(see and improve), it is about applying the knowledge and developments of others with one’s own perspective, or in other words, trying to copy ideas and apply them or even develop them a little moresomething very common in Japanese culture, even beyond cars.

The situation that Toyota would face is that the e-TNGA platform (Toyota New Global Architecture)on which they manufactured the brand’s first 100% electric models, the SUVs Toyota bZ4Xhe Lexus RZ and the model exclusively for the Chinese market BZ3was not designed for cars driven exclusively with this technology, but for adaptable to thermal and hybrid vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

The idea of ​​the new management of the company would be stop the next electrical projects and relaunch them on a new platform exclusively designed for electric cars. For this reason, one of the first actions seems to have been to completely disassemble a Tesla Model Y and observe every detail of its construction. As the specialized site reports, after this inspection, the conclusion reached by the engineers was that the Tesla is “a work of art”.

Tesla’s manufacturing system, again exposed by Elon Musk this Wednesday on the occasion of the brand’s Investor Day, and on which we are even thinking of making a profound change to make its production more economical, we call it “Giga-Press”. It basically consists of assembling two large body sections, to a third which is the battery itself, and which is part of the structure of the car. This allows Tesla lose about 100 kilograms in unions, welds and fasteners, both in screws, bolts, rivets, nuts and washers.

In this same exhibition, Tesla did not hesitate to use as an efficiency comparator, a Toyota Corolla, which will surely not have been to the taste of the leaders of the Japanese brand, who nevertheless do not hesitate to recognize the merit of the Americans.

“It’s a completely different manufacturing philosophy”, an unidentified Toyota executive told AN. While another added that “we need a new platform designed as an electric vehicle from a clean sheet.” Toyota acknowledging Tesla’s merit and Tesla using them as an industry benchmark is always a good thing for both companies.

Nor is this revelation from Toyota the first of its kind in the industry. Polemic ex-CEO of the Volkswagen Group, Herbert Diess, At the end of 2021, he entered an internal crisis within the company when he compared the production levels of Tesla and Volkswagen, between the American brand’s Gigafactory in Berlin and that of the company’s Wolfsburg plant. .

At this point, Diess pointed out that they might need cut 30,000 jobs to be as efficient as Tesla, because while in Berlin 500,000 cars would be produced with 12,000 workers, at Volkswagen 25,000 people were employed for 700,000 units. This dispute, among others, cost him his job a few months later, but the data was expressed as a reality that the industry must face.

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