Toyota’s Smartest Engineering Secret Isn’t An Engine

The modular engineering method in modern car manufacturing is the equivalent of Lego bricks. The same underpinnings can be resized, beefed up, and tweaked to accommodate anything from your yoga instructor’s Prius to the flame-spitting GR Corolla without starting over from scratch.

The wasteful era of disposable vehicle platforms is over. Driven by skyrocketing development costs, rapid technological changes, and the need for global manufacturing agility, clean-sheet redesigns are becoming a thing of the past as modern architectures underpinning everything from the Porsche 911 to the Toyota Camry to the Dodge Charger can now stretch, widen, and adapt across multiple applications. Below is the story of Toyota’s approach to this next-generation manufacturing mantra, and how their Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA) is more than just a structural revolution you probably didn’t even notice.

Toyota Needed To Reinvent Its Engineering

For a very long time, the average life cycle of a new car in the marketplace was about five years. A new, say, Nissan Altima would launch. After two or three years, it would get new lights, bumpers, and interior trim to recapture interest as new competitors joined the scene. A special edition or high-value model would often come towards the end of the life cycle, one final push for attention as the current generation aged out, at which point it would be tossed aside and replaced by the next, all-new unit.

Then, more intensive mid-cycle refreshes began to arrive as automakers mastered manufacturing of the latest high-tensile car structures and the computing power behind their design. Now, mid-cycle updates weren’t just some nip-and-tuck work on the skin, and the lines blurred between what was updated and what was all new.

Case in point? By 2016, the Mitsubishi Outlander was updated with over 100 improvements, including structural, mechanical, and visual tweaks, all without changing platforms. The mid-cycle update was becoming more extensive than ever, changing entire vehicle characters along the way.

Credit: Toyota

As the industry shifted to platform engineering, which no longer required platforms to be replaced with every new generation of vehicle, development costs began to drop. The use of modern-day scalable platforms could free up plenty of capital for use elsewhere, and automakers were catching on.

A few examples of this might live beneath your favorite car. The current Nissan Z uses an evolved version of the Front Midship (FM) platform first introduced with the 350Z back in 2002, itself updated with the 370Z in 2009. The 7th-generation Ford Mustang uses the core structure of the 6th-generation car. The list goes on.

Turns out, trying to build cars to meet local demands around the world was becoming particularly tricky business, as Toyota’s pre-TNGA days had resulted in as many as 100 platforms and sub-platforms. At certain points, the number of powertrains and engines, along with unique adaptations for various markets and models, totaled as many as 800. The logistical and resource demands of supporting this level of global inventory were making it difficult for Toyota to make improvements to individual models during their life cycles, so a new approach was needed to free up time, money, and complexity to stay competitive.

Though TNGA is commonly associated with hardware components, it was also a part of a new business model announced by CEO Akio Toyoda in 2015. “Sudden and drastic changes in the business environment mean that conventional ways of thinking and doing business can no longer help us grow sustainably,” he explained. “We are at a crossroads where we must now build a new business model,” he said.

At the time, Toyota described TNGA as an “innovative, integrated development program for powertrain components and vehicle platforms,” confirming that the latest Prius was the first global product to come from it.

More Than Just A Shared Platform

Credit: Toyota

New modular architectures are designed to be dynamic: stretched, widened, and modified to house a multitude of models on a common structure beneath. One of the most far-reaching embodiments of the new approach to platform engineering is the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), which debuted under the fourth-generation Prius hybrid for the 2016 model year as Toyota was juggling dozens of distinct platform variations across its global lineup.

Eventually, the TNGA approach would change the way Toyota built its models in numerous meaningful ways. The TNGA processes meant factories could be smaller, simpler, and cheaper to build. Production line length and equipment positioning would become dynamic rather than fixed, allowing greater flexibility. New body-finishing processes meant that TNGA-ready factories could paint 50,000 cars per year in a much smaller physical space while adding greater flexibility. Spot welding would give way to Laser Screw Welding (LSW), a new technique that could bond both aluminum and steel while reducing welding cycle times by roughly half to 60 percent compared to traditional methods.

Credit: Toyota

With a key focus on increased rigidity, the TNGA platform also allowed Toyota to make major strides in vehicle handling, refinement, and overall ride quality. Lexus engineers have their own additional technologies and tricks to capitalize on the same ultra-stiff TNGA platforms, benefiting its customers’ luxury experience. Go-fast Toyota GR models benefit from the performance-enabling TNGA platform, thanks to the latest powertrain combinations and built-in handling bandwidth. Having one of the lowest centers of gravity in each segment was, after all, a key design goal.

So too were mega rigidity improvements for the new TNGA platform. In part, that’s because a stiffer vehicle platform forms a better basis from which to tune the suspension system, resulting in a more fine-tuned ride. Stiffer structures also resist flexing better on rougher road surfaces, meaning that less air is physically pumped through the cabin by the flexing body, benefiting interior sound levels.

Sources: Toyota

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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.