Toyotas Lean Homes

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If Toyota built homes what would they look like? Apparently they’ve been in the business for making homes for over twenty years!

Since 1975, Toyota has been building steel-frame houses designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons and keep out burglars. So far, demand for such durable homes has been modest in Japan, where traditional wooden houses are demolished and rebuilt every 30 years on average, nearly twice as often as in the U.S. Toyota’s home business accounted for just 0.5% of the company’s $262 billion in annual sales last year.

At the Kasugai Housing Works in central Japan, one of Toyota’s three prefab-housing factories, an assembly line of robots, conveyor belts and helmeted workers produced a steady flow of rectangular steel-framed cubicles finished with staircases, kitchen cupboards, bathtubs and toilets.

Most Toyota homes are made from six or more of these large cubicles, which are assembled — like Legos — on the building site. From its start on the factory floor to its final completion on site, a Toyota home can be built in 45 days, less than half the time it takes for contractors to build a typical wooden-frame home, Toyota says.

Toyota’s car technologies have been applied to houses, including a rustproofing process that preserves the house’s steel structure for decades; a device to quiet engines that can help damp vibrations from foot traffic on the upper floors; and a single key that can be coded to open both the owner’s Toyota car and Toyota home.

For more information check out this link and this one too.