Chinese manufacturers are launching electric cars at a hellish pace. Toyota’s response: Kaizen philosophy

Two years ago, Tesla was advancing at a dizzying pace. Their sales were growing and they were putting all their machinery in motion to maintain an advantage over competitors. Its production process allowed it to manage such high profit margins that later they could push hard on the price end. Part of his secret was machine called Giga Press. The we could see in their Berlin factory with our own eyes. Huge, imposing. With it, the company produces larger chassis parts more quickly. That allows you manufacture much faster than the competition because for rivals that same piece consists of many other smaller pieces that must be assembled. The revolution is such that large companies They seemed determined to get theirs own to be able to stand up. Tesla also announced that I was ready to create larger pieces and, therefore, further reduce times manufacturing with a larger Giga Press. Time has told us thatElon Musk’s are having problems to carry out this evolution of the Giga Press. And that the machine, no matter how much it can make copies at a great rate, also has its counterpart as very long machine breaks when you want to modify the part in question. But speed up development times seems to be the focus of large companies. Chery assured a long time ago that chinese rule It was kind of inevitable. For them, Europe has lost the battle because the development of their vehicles is much fasterresponding to public demands at a frenetic pace. And although we are talking about a Chinese brand defending its business formula, the industry does seems to be moving in that direction. Honda and Nissan explored a merger to save this second one from bankruptcy. One of the objectives to be exploited with this possible merger was to be more agile in the development of automobiles. Renault boasted just a few days ago that your Twingo has been developed in record time. In China, of course. But faced with the infernal pace and a frenetic launch number, Toyota seems to be opting for the complete opposite. Pause and perfectionism. In short: philosophy kaizen. Why does an electric car have less autonomy than advertised? Kaizen philosophy or how to perfect a product A good example of how the Chinese industry pushes to launch models on the market at a frenetic pace is that of BYD. The Chinese company is experiencing first-hand the dangers of following the devilish pace of less powerful startups when you aspire to manufacture more than five million cars a year. And 2025 has been marked by the announcement that they would incorporate their most advanced driving systems into all their cars in China. To all, without exception, including the BYD Seagull (BYD Dolphin Surf in Europe). A car that sells for less than 10,000 euros in the Asian market. This has become obsolete of their own cars and has had an immediate consequence, with customers waiting for the new and more advanced models, the units that do not incorporate this technology have accumulated in their dealerships waiting for a possible buyer. That strategy, that of launching a product on the market in the shortest possible time and fixing its possible defects on the fly, relying on a adaptive capacity Extraordinarily fast, it plays against what the Japanese philosophy has always been. In Japan they have made philosophy kaizen its greatest exponent. Guillermo García Alfonsín explains in this documentary on YouTube how Japan has built a car empire from nothing. One of the great secrets has always been to study to the point of exhaustion how to improve an existing product, paying obsessive attention to the smallest detail. The result is that Japanese companies are always at the top of the reliability tables. Chinese manufacturers are choosing to reduce development times to a minimum. Toyota bets on the opposite The culture shock is evident. Faced with companies that develop their products at a dizzying pace and apply all kinds of improvements in the shortest possible time, Japanese perfectionism prefers to play it safe, with lead feet but with the guarantee that what they put on the market is the best result they can achieve. a few months ago From Toyota itself it was implied that the rush had reached the heart of the company, that they felt they were missing the train of the technology of the future. To this narrative, it is now assured Nikkei, The conservative vision has prevailed: a generation of cars that will last up to nine years to safely face the leap to electric cars. Until now, each generation of Toyota lasted between five and seven years, moving at the same times as the rest of the industry. The Japanese newspaper assures, however, that Toyota is betting on renewals of the models that will approach the decade and that it will be the remote updates that keep the car up to date. Of course, in Nikkei They point out that the models for China will follow their own rhythm, with more constant launches. The decision also seems a response to a complicated regulatory market. Toyota is one of the few companies that has renounced the electric car As the only solution, he has been defending for some time that each market requires different cars and that it is necessary to adapt to them. And in that context, it is the automotive group that more cars sold by far. The Japanese are treading carefully before making the leap to electrification. He Toyota bZ4X It was a sales failure and aspires with its latest update to boost the units it has put on the market. High consumption, equally high price and an improvable production process They put an end to the company’s first electric model. The jump to the electric car is also a challenge for the company, according to the consultants employed by the same company. The reverse engineering company Caresoft Global It already alerted Toyota that its production process … Read more

The memory of young people is deteriorating at a record pace. Science thinks it knows why

The memory problems among youth are beginning to be worrying. This is what a new study scientist published in the magazine Neurology and that tries to answer why this happens and above all the reasons that exist for our youth to begin to be in decline in regards to to your memory. The surprise. What can logically be expected is that with the passage of time and accompanying aging, memory problems begin to appear that anticipate dementia. But in the United States, after analyzing millions of people, they have seen that the population most affected by this ‘mental fog’ is precisely the youth. And the result in this case is very important: self-reported cognitive problems among young adults aged 18 to 39 have almost doubled in the last decade. But it is something that we are not understanding. The study. To reach this conclusion, a total of 4.5 million people who responded to the national survey of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from the CDC and collected between 2013 and 2023. In this way, there was a truly large sample of people to analyze, although limited only to the United States. The results in this case were quite clear: the prevalence of adults reporting a cognitive disability increased from 5.3% in 2013 to 7.4% in 2024. But what was truly interesting came when separating the results by demographics: In young people aged 18 to 39, the rate skyrocketed from 5.1% in 2013 to 9.7% in 2023. This group is, in fact, the driver of the overall increase in the entire population. In those over 70 years of age we saw a decrease in prevalence from 7.3% to 6.6%, when logic tells us that it should increase. Other factors. In order to know the reason for this increase, other factors behind the respondents had to be traced as well. In this case it aimed at the income level: Have low income with less than 35,000 dollars a year left us with a prevalence that increased from 8.8% to 12.6% With high incomes (>$75,000) the rate was much lower, although it also dropped from 1.8% to 3.9%. But the same thing happens with the educational level, where young people who did not even have high school went from 11.1% to 14.3% while those with university degrees increased from 2.1% to 3.6%. And even in order to obtain much more information, they wanted to analyze the prevalence according to the race of young people, where it could also be seen, for example, that Asian adults are the ones who reported the least cognitive problems. Specifically, the data is the following: American Indians/Alaska Natives: continue to have the highest prevalence, rising from 7.5% to 11.2%. Hispanic adults: saw a significant increase from 6.8% to 9.9%. Black adults: The rate rose from 7.3% to 8.2%. White adults: increased from 4.5% to 6.3%. Asian adults: Consistently maintained the lowest rates, going from 3.9% to 4.8%. What is happening? With all the data in hand, it is logical to think about what is happening so that young people increasingly have more cognitive problems. And for researchers there is not only one valid answer, but there are several that are being proposed. The first of them is that there is greater awareness about this problem, and that is why there are more people who raise their hands when presenting it and have no doubts when it comes to seeking help. But there are also other factors such as economic stressors or work problems that seem to be contributing to these trends. All this without forgetting that the greater presence of digital tools may have meant that our memory is not as trained. But all the social and economic factors we face today can also mark an important milestone when it comes to the real burden on our minds. This ‘overload’ can condition the appearance of these highly relevant cognitive symptoms. Images | Eliott Reyna Milad Fakurian In Xataka | Finding a job had always been a good way to escape poverty: in Spain it is no longer true

Byd is growing at a devilish pace and on the road has given a lesson to Toyota, according to Reuters

It was the year 2020, with Spain locked in their home by the Coronavirus pandemic, when Toyota and Byd reached an agreement to manufacture electric cars together. A five years later, Byd appears to finish the year as the fifth world vehicle manufacturer. And Toyota, the great queen of the automotive, is “stunned.” “We are stunned”. The words are expressed by two employees of the company, according to Reuters. The news agency has made a report to understand how the growth of byd, the great Chinese giant of electrified vehicles that, despite selling only plug and electrical hybrids, has presented credentials to be the fifth largest manufacturer in the world in 2025 in 2025. These employees thus explain what the impression that Toyota workers maintained a close collaboration with Byd employees in China were taken. Since 2020both companies work together to remove electric cars in China. Small successes. Until now, Toyota has launched with Byd a completely electric Berlina in China. It is the Toyota Bz3an electric car that has had a discreet reception in the country, the most competitive electric car market in the world where cars without histrionisms like the Toyota They are having problems attracting customers. However, the TOYOTA BZ3Xwhich has already been announced and that will arrive this year, it begins to be a small success for the company. The car received 10,000 orders In just an hour since the reserves were opened. And the offensive with Byd will be greater this same 2025 with the launch of the Toyota Bz5 And, in the future, the larger model, the BZ7. But, without a doubt, this data is not being their greatest conquest. (Re) Learning. The best thing that Toyota is taking out of his association with Byd is to relear how to make a car. It sounds hard but it seems like that. In the report of Reutersbrand workers explain that they were surprised with the speed and speed with which they work in the Chinese company. What most caught the attention to the Japanese company was the speed with which they make decisions in Byd, they approve changes and begin to apply them. It is something that former European firms that now work for Chinese companies have explained us in Informal talks with Xataka. There, everything works much faster and the changes happen much faster. An example, they explain in Reutersare the studies they do in Toyota before applying any change. According to the agency, the Japanese starts six different prototypes and submit them to thousands of kilometers of evidence. Only when they collect and analyze these data, put the car on the market. Not everything is worth. Despite being impressed with the speed of these changes and ensuring that engineers return with “a bag full of lessons”, there are changes in their way of acting that Toyota does not want to implementsince they consider that they would put their reliable car fame at risk. The Japanese ensure that skipping this process of putting various prototypes on the street or applying structural changes when the project is already very advanced would be a risk to the final product that are not willing to run. For Toyota it is a “no, never”, in the words of workers collected by the company. It is not the first notice. What is clear is that what has learned by Toyota by the hand of Byd is not the first notice they receive. In that same article, Zeekr employees, a Geely company that is landing in Europe, explains that part of its success is to save time and money in the production processes and the materials used. The latter is something that Some experts have already notified Toyota That, like other Japanese companies, they are spending resources on materials that are not entirely necessary in their electric cars since they do not have the classic vibrations of a combustion engine. The latter has allowed Byd or Tesla to delve into the use of plastics, saving in weight, money and manufacturing times. Photo | Byd and Toyota In Xataka | Toyota boast “Kaizen” philosophy and a sickly perfectionism. Tesla and Byd have serious doubts that it is really useful

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