Toyota to present 3-year-plan in early 2023
According to an agency report, Toyota will present a new three-year plan to its suppliers in early 2023 as part of its electric strategy. With the new plan, the manufacturer wants to increase the competitiveness of its upcoming electric vehicle models, but is probably accepting delays for this.
Reuters, citing Toyota insiders, reports that the company will present plans for its new electric models up to 2026 for its major suppliers in early 2023. This should allow the major suppliers, in turn, to align their development and production.
However, as the report goes on to say, this could also include “delays in some of the EV development programmes that were originally planned for the three-year period”, according to one of the informants. Specifically, the successor to the just-launched bZ4X and the technically related Lexus RZ are mentioned.
Toyota itself would not directly confirm the information when asked. The company told Reuters that it is “always actively discussing and collaborating with key people (suppliers and partners) on a variety of topics”.
The future of the e-TNGA platform, on which vehicles such as the bZ4X and Lexus RZ are based, is also in question. The e-TNGA for the electric vehicles was derived from the TNGA internal combustion hybrid platform so that the vehicles could be produced together on one line. Therefore, Toyota had deliberately made compromises in the development, but this now limits the possibilities to rethink production in a similarly radical way as Tesla. In addition to a completely new development of an all-electric platform, the integration of a new heat management system or more efficient e-drives was probably also investigated together with suppliers Denso and Aisin – but the result of this review is not yet known.
Already at the end of October, Reuters had reported that Toyota could partially scrap the plan to invest 38 billion dollars in battery-electric cars, which had only been announced at the end of 2021. Akio Toyoda had presented a total of 15 concept electric cars in December and announced that a total of 30 BEV models would be launched by 2030.
According to insiders, Toyota wants to reduce production costs in order to “better compete with Tesla and other competitors” – this reasoning is also repeated in the current Reuters article. According to the article, work on some of the 30 electric cars has already been stopped. According to the insiders, a working group called ‘Business Revolution’ has now been tasked with drafting plans for improvements to the existing BEV platform or for a new architecture by the beginning of next year – which will apparently be announced to suppliers in February.
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