Live in your next Toyota [the broken link was removed]:
Housing makes up less than 1% of Toyota’s $183 billion annual sales. But company officials say technology acquired from years of making cars is central to homebuilding Toyota style.
A “smart key” similar to the car key you don’t need to take out of your pocket to unlock your Toyota opens and closes the front door. A mechanism for reducing engine noise and tremors is installed under the floor to quiet upstairs shakes. Car paint-job skills deliver even scratch-resistant coating on walls.
Toyota homes are mass produced like Toyota cars. About 85% of the work on the metal-frame cubicles is finished at the plant. The prefabricated cubicles, made to order for the customer, are stacked like toy blocks with a huge crane and topped with a roof in just six hours.
Interesting. I still am surprised Toyota isn’t doing more with mass transit but they obviously know more than me. Toyota partner robots are a good strategic vision in my opinion.
Toyota made just 4,600 homes last year, and is planning 5,000 homes this year. But it’s on a roll, recording 50 straight months of on-year sales growth. It’s targeting 7,000 homes per year by 2010.
It would seem to me India and China would be a great growth market for Toyota homes. Obviously this is still a very small part of Toyota but 10 or 20 years from now people may wonder how Toyota became much more than a car company.
Could Toyota’s efforts beyond automobiles create problems over the long term? Yes. But Toyota’s solid management system is built with the knowledge that change is inevitable (Toyota’s Early History – Toyota was a loom maker before moving into the automobile industry). If Toyota wants to prosper in the future it needs to continue to grow and adapt and take risks.
