An assembly line at the Toyota factory in Onnaing, near Valenciennes, May 16, 2013 (AFP / PHILIPPE HUGUEN)
Overloaded production lines and hiring: with its production of small hybrid cars, the Toyota factory in Valenciennes is going against the tide of an automobile industry that is slowing down and laying off workers in Europe.
France's largest automobile factory celebrated its five millionth car produced on Tuesday since its opening in 2001, a Yaris Cross SUV painted blue-white-red for the occasion.
The group will, over the next two years, transform into permanent contracts the contracts of 600 of the 1,000 employees currently on fixed-term or temporary contracts, out of a total of 5,000 employees, announced Didier Leroy, who has become chairman of the board of directors of Toyota Motor. Europe after managing the factory.
Industry Minister Marc Ferracci hailed Valenciennes as “a galvanizing story in the current context”.
Most European manufacturers are having a series of bad quarters with falling sales, and equipment manufacturers are laying off workers.
“There is never any inevitability, 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. For comparison, the Peugeot cradle in Sochaux has just increased to 1,040 vehicles per day.
The 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 kilo bodies, while 15 to 30 trucks per day return to nearby steelworks with the scraps.
Nearby, Toyota produces its own bumpers and dashboards. Stock is very limited.
– Three shifts per day –
In showers of sparks, 600 robots then carry out the 3,800 welding points on the vehicle. Other, smaller robots then take care of other operations, such as installing roof linings.
The operators know 3 or 4 processes and change positions every shift.
The Valenciennes factory is driven by the success in Europe of hybrid models, which pollute and consume a little less than thermal vehicles, and remain much cheaper than electric ones.
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 shifts per day, Valenciennes produced 275,000 cars in 2023, 85% of which were exported to other European countries. It is targeting 286,000 cars this year, and 300,000 eventually.
The secret? “It’s knowing how to question our ways of doing things, not simply being content, as some may think, with copying Japanese methodologies,” explained Didier Leroy.
The Japanese method (notably “kaizen”, or continuous improvement) is however put forward by the minister himself, with a “rigorous method” which consists of “looking for the root causes”.
The minister also praised the “quality of the relationship between Toyota and its subcontractors”. “This is not always the case in the automobile industry,” underlined Mr. Ferracci.
Toyota management, which has long defended the choice of hybrid technology over electric, did not wish to specify whether a new electric model could eventually replace the Yaris Cross in Valenciennes.
“The objective for us is to always have the right technology at the right time,” insisted Didier Leroy, extolling the merits of hybridization to decarbonize the automobile as quickly as possible.
Toyota “has a very strong desire to continue to invest massively in Europe”, underlined Didier Leroy. “Will it be at TMMF (Valenciennes)? It only depends on us, on our ability to develop a truly large, differentiating project that will allow us to take a step forward in terms of performance.”
