We were recently invited by UMW Toyota Motor Sdn Bhd to join them in Japan for the Asia Regional Journalist meet last week. Amidst the recalls affecting millions, the trip as we learned, reaffirmed Toyota's commitment to technological superiority, advancement in safety, and of course, continuous effort to improve the quality of its cars.
As part of the meet, we were taken to visit the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology to see how the Toyota story started followed by a trip to Toyota City at Nagoya where Toyota's commitment to quality was put on display, onto Toyota's Technical Center at Higashi Fuji where we witnessed a crash test for ourselves and put to test the latest safety technology by Lexus. And finally we got the chance to take a ride in the world's biggest playstation, Toyota's huge dome simulator that puts a real car inside a virtual reality dome that hosts a 360-degree view, it works to provide real world driving characteristics so Toyota's engineers can accurately gauge driving characteristics that helps engineers cars that saves lives.
All this visiting, observing and questioning provides for a great read, but it's all too much to list here, so this is the first of a grand four part series starting with our trip to the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, a place that serves as a homage to the Toyota heritage and houses the machines that started it all, weaving machines!
It's true, if it were not for the weaving machines that Toyota founder, Sakichi Toyoda, invented, we would not have such great cars as the Celica, Supra, LF-A, MR-2, AE86, FT-86 and other legendary Toyota and Lexus cars.
The museum itself is built on the grounds where Mr. Sakichi Toyoda's weaving machines once provided jobs for the people of Nagoya, and now it exhibits over 4000 pieces of original equipment and features displays by trained operators. At the entrance lays the ingenuous invention by Mr.Sakichi known as the circular loom. Built in 1906, this weaving machine incorporates the values that we see in Toyota today, technology. It integrates many inventive technologies, such as three-dimensional weaving. Seen in the picture above the cylinder hanging from the ceiling is made from fabric woven from this loom. The loom in turn is powered by a huge cross compound steam engine made by a Swiss company in 1898, seen in the picture below.
Regarded as "The King of Japanese Inventors", Mr.Sakichi Toyoda is also referred to as the father of Japanese industrial revolution. However weaving is one of the oldest form of technology known to mankind as it goes all the way back to the stone age, if you're not familiar with that we're talking about going as far back as 2.9 million years ago! Mr.Sakichi just perfected it with the use of some clever technology. He invented numerous weaving machines but the one piece of technology that gave much credit to the Toyoda name was the invention of the principle of Jidoka, which means that the machine stops itself whenever a problem occurs. This ingenious technology is now part of the Toyota Production System.
Type G - The machine that started it all
However, the one piece of machinery that bestowed immortality upon Mr.Sakichi Toyoda and gave rise to the Toyota Motor Corporation, is another weaving machine known as the Type G. Built in 1924, the Toyoda Automatic Loom Type G is a completely automatic high-speed loom that is able to change its shuttles (that holds the threads, seen placed at the top left of the machine above) without stopping production. At that time it was the world's most advanced loom; it delivered a dramatic improvement in quality and a twenty-fold increase in productivity! It also brought the Toyoda family one million Yen, that's one billion Yen in today's money. Enough to help develop the first ever Toyoda car.
Toyota Motor Co., Ltd was established by Sakichi's eldest son, Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937. But the first ever Toyota car was produced two years earlier under his fathers company. Known as the AA, the first ever car that went into production under the Toyoda brand had one predecessor, the A1 prototype. Only three versions of the A1 were ever built but none of them survive today. Based on the Chrysler Airflow, the A1 was considered to be very modern for its time. Available only as a right hand drive model, the A1 was powered by a 4-liter 6-cylinder engine that churned out 62hp with a 3 speed column mounted manual gearbox.
The A1 prototype provided the mechanicals that were to be used in the car of the same design but it was the G1 truck that Toyoda built for quick profits. After the G1 was put into production, Toyoda concentrated on turning the A1 into a mass-produced vehicle known as the AA. A total of 1,404 AA sedans was produced from 1936 until 1943, none of them survive either but a derelict unit found in Russia lives on in a Dutch museum. The AA went on to be replaced by the more austere AC model, but the only difference lay in its cabriolet roof layout and the windscreen that could be laid down flat onto its bonnet. It was more of a rich man's AA, but then again, any car of that period was meant for the wealthy.
Since the AA, AB and AC, a number of prototypes were built and small scale production models ensued but World War 2 dealt a blow to the company's plans. It was only after the war that Toyota could go back to what it did best, and through development in technology and quality, Toyota has come a long way since. Today, the Toyota Corolla is the company's best selling vehicles with sales exceeding 30million units worldwide. And it all started with one weaving machine, that's quite a story.
We talk about how and why Toyota put its vehicles through a durability test, flooded road test, an electric wave test, and we watch them crash a Toyota Crown into a Yaris at 55km/h. All that in Part 2.
More pictures up shortly.
