Party favors, overloaded production lines, hiring. With its production of small hybrid cars, the Toyota factory in Valenciennes is going against the grain of a car industry that is slowing down and laying off workers in Europe. The largest automobile factory in France celebrated this Tuesday the production of the five millionth vehicle since its opening in 2001, a Yaris Cross SUV painted for the occasion in blue, white and red.
More than 1,200 cars produced per day
Over the next two years, the group will transform the contracts of 600 of the 1,000 employees who currently have temporary or fixed-term contracts into permanent contracts, out of a total of 5,000 employees, announced Didier Leroy, who has become president of the board of administration. of executives from Toyota Motor Europe after managing the factory.
Industry Minister Marc Ferracci praised Valenciennes as “a stimulating story in the current context.”
Most European manufacturers are going through a series of bad quarters with sales falling and equipment makers laying off workers. “It is never inevitable, you showed us that an automobile industry was possible in France,” he told Toyota executives.
The factory opened in 2001 is compact and efficient, with a production of 1,230 vehicles per day. In comparison, Peugeot’s cradle in Sochaux has just increased to 1,040 vehicles per day.
A compact factory, local production of parts.
Workshops touch each other to limit wasted time. At the start of the line, four large presses transform the five- to fifteen-ton steel coils into 180-kilogram bodies, while between 15 and 30 trucks a day return to nearby steel mills with the scrap. Nearby, Toyota produces its own bumpers and dashboards. The stock is very limited.
Next, under a shower of sparks, 600 robots perform the 3,800 welding points on the vehicle. Other smaller robots take care of other operations, such as installing the roof covering. The operators know 3 or 4 processes and change positions each shift.
A target of 300,000 cars per year
The Valenciennes factory is driven by the success in Europe of hybrid models, which pollute and consume a little less than thermal vehicles, and are still much cheaper than electric vehicles. The factory manufactured a single model, the compact Yaris, for twenty years before integrating its SUV version, the Yaris Cross. This now represents 75% of production, while the Yaris has largely migrated to Toyota’s Czech factory.
After moving to three daily shifts, Valenciennes produced 275,000 cars in 2023, 85% of which were exported to other European countries. Their goal is 286,000 cars this year and 300,000 eventually. The secret?
“It means knowing how to question our way of doing things, not being content, as some might think, with copying Japanese methodologies,” explained Didier Leroy.
The Japanese method (in particular “kaizen”, or continuous improvement) is, however, proposed by the Minister himself, with a “rigorous method” that consists of “searching for the root causes.”
“Continue investing massively in Europe”
The minister also praised the “quality of the relationship between Toyota and its subcontractors.” “This is not always the case in the automobile industry,” stressed Marc Ferracci. Toyota management, which has long defended the choice of hybrid technology over electric technology, did not want to specify whether a new electric model could replace the Yaris Cross in Valenciennes.
“For us, the goal is to always have the right technology at the right time,” insisted Didier Leroy, extolling the advantages of hybridization to decarbonize the automobile as soon as possible. Toyota “has a very strong desire to continue investing massively in Europe,” stressed Didier Leroy. “Will it be in TMMF (Valenciennes)? It only depends on us, on our ability to develop a really large and differentiating project that allows us to take a step forward in terms of performance.”
Source: BFM TV
