Toyota Technical Centre
The Business of Building Cars Never Stops
Story by Howard J. Elmer
Most of the news about Toyota these days seems so bad, but yet, the business of building cars never stops and even while they are fixing their very public problems, many other Toyota people are hard at work making sure these issues are never repeated. I recently visited a centre whose job it is to do just this; a place where they spend one million dollars an hour, every hour, of every day on future product research and development.
The Toyota Technical Centre sits at the centre of a 106-acre site near Ann Arbor, MI, where it is home to a crash test facility, test track and over half-a-million square feet of design and testing labs. It’s this place (along with three others like it) that spends that cash. And when you see the list of new vehicles that this place (in conjunction with other Toyota tech centres) has been instrumental in launching, that million dollars an hour starts to make sense. In fact, since 1994, they’ve created, tested and brought to market the Camry Coupe, Camry Sedan, Avalon, Solara, Tundra, Venza and just recently, the 2011 Sienna.
TTC is a labyrinth of meeting rooms, computer design studios, and laboratories – none of which we were allowed to see. The reason? Well one of the tour directors joked that they just didn’t have enough sheets available to cover all the things they’d have to hide from us – so instead we were herded into a conference room where we watched some less-than-interesting promo videos.
But it wasn’t all boring; the exception was the high-speed video footage we were shown of the crash testing recently done on the new Sienna minivan at the centre. With cameras trained on the imminent crash site from every angle (including one from below), the collisions were filmed with high-speed cameras that captured thousands of frames in under a second during impact. When those frames are played back one at a time, a clear chain of events emerges showing the precise collapse of components and the dissipation of crash energy through the body of the vehicle. These tests are the proof that the engineering done in labs upstairs will in fact work to protect the occupants of the vehicle.
The footage shot from below is particularly riveting during a head-on crash. This view is filmed up through a clear Plexiglas floor and shows the crumpling of all the front fascia and components, the displacement of the engine and the separation of the driveshaft all happening in less than a second – in fact, you can actually see the crash energy ripple through the metal parts towards the rear of the vehicle. Meanwhile, the crash test dummies, shot with an onboard camera bob, bounce and lean into their exploding airbags, but come through safely as the vehicle comes to a halt. This is the business of safety, and thinking of that figure I mentioned earlier, I’m starting to see why it’s such an expensive one.
But TTC is just one of four facilities that Toyota has around the United States (not counting its cold-weather testing site in Timmins, ON). In all, over a thousand employees come to work at these tech centres every day to crash cars, and while that has to be fun, they apparently do other experiments as well.
Michigan TTC is also responsible for design engineering and evaluation, and houses Toyota’s emission and engine tuning lab, as well as the prototype design studio. Meanwhile, out in California, another Toyota tech centre works on Fuel Cell and Satellite research while the monster facility in Arizona would have to be one of the more exciting places to work. Mainly because this 12,000-acre site is home to Toyota’s private 16-km high-speed oval track. This is the place where test drivers run new cars, doing endurance testing, often flat-out, 24 hours a day.
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