The central role that people play in this corner of the Georgetown plant is repeated in varying degrees throughout the factory and exemplifies the uniqueness of Toyota's manufacturing philosophy, which while still cutting edge continues to curiously nod to the past. Even as the automaker unveils an updated version of its vaunted production system, called the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), the company has resisted the very modern allure of automation–a particularly contrarian stance to take in the car industry, which is estimated to be responsible for over half of commercial robot purchases in North America.
“Our automation ratio today is no higher than it was 15 years ago,” Wil James, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Kentucky, told me as we sat in his office above the 8.1-million-square-foot (170 football fields) factory. And that ratio was low to begin with: For at least the last 10 years, robots have been responsible for less than 8% of the work on Toyota's global assembly lines. “Machines are good for repetitive things,” James continued, “but they can't improve their own efficiency or the quality of their work. Only people can.” He added that Toyota has conducted internal studies comparing the time it took people and machines to assemble a car; over and over, human labor won.
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