If you were to pick a company whose approach to automotive engineering ran directly counter to the software world’s ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy, then it would have to be Toyota. After all, this is a company whose strategic plans are measured in decades, not months.
But Toyota also can’t ignore the march toward the software-defined car and the extra revenue that will undoubtedly come from having a global fleet of connected, updatable and data-generating vehicles.
So what is the Toyota strategy? The answer – what else? – is that it will take same methodical approach to software as does for vehicle development and manufacturing. Toyota says it will “achieve TPS in software”, referring to its famed Toyota Production System that mandates that production is stopped immediately a problem occurs, to prevent defective vehicles reaching the showrooms.
Journalists were given an insight into the process at a November event by James Kuffner (pictured below), Toyota’s former chief digital officer and the now head of the company’s software division, Woven Planet.
But this was very different from recent software presentations from the likes of Stellantis, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors or Renault. No bumper revenue predictions were given, no chip company tie-ups were announced and no roll-out dates for the first Toyota software-defined cars were given. “Toyota tries to be humble. We want to under-promise and over-deliver,” Kuffner told Autocar Business when asked why. “We want to meet quality and safety standards and earn customer trust.”
In terms of roll-out for the first car running Toyota’s Arene vehicle operating system, Kuffner would only say it was global and would arrive “in the next few years”. Japanese newspaper Nikkei last year reported it would be 2025.
As for revenue, Toyota would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of shifting to a properly monetisable operating system, reckons banking firm UBS. “Among legacy OEMs, we consider GM, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and Hyundai as best placed for the software era”, UBS wrote in a recent report, indicating the company could earn between 10% and 20% of its revenue by 2030 from software-enabled services such as semi-automated driving, full robotaxis and connected services.