Behind The Wheel – Episode 2: Inside The Materials Lab
In the 12 years I’ve worked in Toyota, we have come across to many weird testing that we do. Some of them are not so obvious if you don’t work in an automotive company. For example, the chocolate staining test, which is of course very important for people who have kids. You would be surprised how many extreme tests we do in Toyota to guarantee a good quality for our customers and to make sure that the parts are really durable and they can have a very long lifetime. One of those extreme tests, for example, is the cold impact test where we actually place a vehicle inside a big chamber and then we lower the temperature to minus30. Then we drop some specific weights on the different parts. So, we want to know if they will crack or if they will lose some flexibility. Do you know this new car smell? Well, some people like it and some people don’t. This new car smell is not something we intentionally designed to be in the car, but it’s more a byproduct from the manufacturing process and which we actually want to be able to control. We do this by performing a smell test where we put some pieces of the parts inside a container and this container we will heat up inside an oven and we invite some trained smell panelist members to come and to smell the bottles and they give then the judgment on pleasantness and intensity of the smell and if they don’t follow the requirements we work together with the manufacturer to improve the smell of the materials. When we talk about the future of material sciences in automotive industry, one of the big things we are focusing on is sustainability. For example, we are starting to use some parts made from recycled plastics such as the dashboard on the APM developed for Paris Olympics. And as material science continues to evolve, these innovations will help make our car safer and more comfortable. Our goal is to keep reducing our impact and improve the sustainability of our manufacturing processes.
Not all materials are created equal, and Tine knows why.
Step inside Toyota’s Materials Engineering lab with Expert Technician Tine Verdeyen. From metals to soft materials, she tests and evaluates each one to ensure it meets Toyota’s highest standards for durability, safety, and comfort.
This is the second episode of the ‘Behind The Wheel’ series, where Toyota members talk about our technologies, innovations and projects through their personal angle.
