Shimoyama: Inside Toyota’s shiny new 300-billion yen playground
From a software system that mimics a thousand cars to an electric vehicle with a fake manual gearbox, Toyota’s engineers are not only developing new cars, but new kinds of cars altogether
AFTER taking me through some snaking turns at tyre-screeching speed, the Toyota test driver turns to me and asks if I feel okay. “Sure,” I tell him. That’s when he floors it and aims straight for a blind crest that a sane driver would dab the brakes for.
For one cinematic moment, the little GR Yaris we’re sitting in gets completely airborne, and when it plops back to earth with impeccable poise, we both giggle like naughty schoolchildren.
Toyota hasn’t said it wants to develop flying cars, but someone forgot to tell the engineers and test drivers who work at its Shimoyama technical centre. At seven or eight points on the sprawling complex’s 5.3 km-long test track, they point out that if you go fast enough you can launch a car clear into the air – not just for laughs, but to see if its suspension will deliver a smooth, stable landing.
Just half-an-hour’s drive from Toyota City, the Shimoyama centre sprawls over 6,508 sq km of pristine forested hills. The undulating terrain there creates the perfect landscape for a challenging test track to put prototype cars through their paces on.
The main circuit packs 32 corners into its jagged layout – some of them blind, some of them cambered the wrong way, and some surfaced poorly to mimic road conditions from around the world. The tarmac rises and dips dramatically, taking drivers through 23 storeys’ worth of elevation changes. Insiders call the place “mini Nurburgring”, after the deadly German circuit that regularly sorts the automotive wheat from the chaff.
Toyota says it designed the place to be hard on cars so it can hone them better. It is still developing Shimoyama four-and-a-half years after the first 50 people started working there – a building that brings Lexus’ design, engineering and sales teams under one roof, with 50 garages for prototype vehicles, is scheduled to open early next year. All in, it will spend 300 billion yen (S$2.7 billion) on the place and have 3,300 boffins tinkering with future cars there.
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Wacky stuff
Judging from the ideas being worked on that Toyota showed the automotive press last weekend, Shimoyama is inspiring some wacky stuff. For a start, it trotted out the AE86 BEV Concept, a 40-year-old classic Toyota (made famous by Initial D, a manga series about drifting) with its petrol engine ripped out and an off-the-shelf, 95 kilowatt hybrid motor from the Tundra pick-up truck bolted in its place, with batteries from a plug-in hybrid Lexus sport utility vehicle (SUV) to power everything.
The battery pack sits relatively high up in the car, where the rear seats usually are, meaning its weight could affect the legendary 86’s centre of gravity. “Not great for cornering,” I suggest to the engineer in charge of the project. “No,” he admits, with a grin. “But for drifting: ok!”
The AE86 BEV (which stands for “Battery Electric Vehicle”) ostensibly explores the idea that old cars could be retrofitted with electric drivetrains readily, to speed up the technology’s adoption.
But it’s more of an ambassador for BEV technology. Showcasing it in a beloved icon from the past is Toyota’s way of suggesting that the boisterous howl of combustion that we’ve loved for more than a century doesn’t have to be destroyed by the silence and silky smoothness of electric motors.
In fact, speakers inside the AE86 BEV blare out a digital combustion soundtrack that sounds like the real thing. Because the concept car still has a clutch and manual gearbox, the driver can rev the electric motor like an engine, and the sound generator does a fine imitation of pistons firing furiously.
I ask if the 86’s sound is changeable, and an engineer gleefully whips out a smartphone and taps the screen a few times. Like magic, the old Toyota takes on the voice of the Lexus LFA, a car developed to kill the brand’s reputation for building dull cars.
With a banshee-like howl from a V10 engine, the LFA lost money for Lexus but demolished Ferraris and Lamborghinis with its laptimes. A few more taps on the smartphone gives the AE86 BEV the rumbling voice of a Ford Mustang V8.
It all sounds like aimless fun, but using digital technology to revive beloved analogue traits is something Toyota is taking seriously. To demonstrate, powertrain engineer Yoichiro Isami invites me into a Lexus UX 300e (a battery-powered car) with a strange modification: it has a clutch pedal and the gear selector from a six-speed manual gearbox. Both are remarkable because the car has neither a clutch nor a gearbox.
Instead, Isami says the so-called Manual BEV digitally replicates the experience of driving a manual car. Speakers create the sound and vibration of a petrol engine, while the motor is tuned to perform the way a combustion car would in a given gear. A rev counter and gear position indicator also take part in the illusion.
It seems dubious, but after driving the car I would bet my left foot that no one would be able to tell the difference between the Manual BEV prototype and an actual combustion car with a clutch and gearbox. It recreates the experience spookily well.
Engage sixth gear too early and the car judders and strains to accelerate. Let the clutch out too quickly when starting off and the car mimics a stall by falling dead silent and rolling lifelessly to a halt. Perform a sloppy gearshift, and the Lexus lurches appropriately.
Manual allure
Isami says Lexus fully intends to put the technology on the market. Why, I ask, when the world has largely given up on manuals anyway? He pushes a button and the UX 300e reverts to being a pure electric car. He invites me to floor it. “Let’s experience a BEV. It has smooth and very powerful acceleration,” he says. “But to me, it’s a little bit boring.”
Unsurprisingly, the youthful Isami has only ever owned manual cars (he currently drives a GR Yaris). He says it wasn’t difficult for him to recreate the various shocks and judders of a manual car by programming the UX 300e’s motor system accordingly, but the real breakthrough came when the sound guys were able to chip in with the appropriate engine noises.
Yet another prototype takes the idea one step further, in the form of a schizophrenic Lexus RZ. With a few keystrokes on a laptop plugged into the car, an engineer transforms the RZ into a Toyota Passo; instantly, the RZ’s rapid acceleration gives way to the sluggish performance you expect of a city runabout with a burbling 1.0-litre petrol engine.
Another setting has it rumbling like a Toyota Tundra pickup. And of course, a bit more fiddling with the laptop engages a setting for the Lexus LFA, a car I never got to drive but I now feel I almost have.
Lexus calls the idea “BEV on-demand”. In the prototype RZ, it only affects noise and acceleration, but when Lexus puts the idea into production it will also alter the car’s steering and suspension characteristics, allowing it to digitally recreate any number of models from Toyota’s back catalogue.
Think of it as a thousand cars in one; buy your electric Lexus, then download the acceleration, steering and suspension settings of any classic Toyota you want, accompanied by the appropriate soundtrack.
The idea will hit the market when when AreneOS becomes a commercial reality in about two years’ time. That, too, will open up new ways of using a car. At Shimoyama, a prototype car filled with cameras is able to track passengers’ hands and facial expressions.
That means you can point through the windscreen at a building and say, “Hey, Lexus, what’s that?” and expect an answer, with Artificial Intelligence supplying follow-up queries. Point at a building that turns out to be a hotel, and the car asks if you want it to make a reservation for you.
Something that is still “just an idea”, one engineer says, is the ability to point at a pedestrian’s clothes and have your Lexus tell you what they are and let you buy them through AreneOS immediately. That particular feature seems more like menace than magic to me.
But it’s not all fun and games at Shimoyama. The company is working on Neo Steer, a control system for disabled drivers. It adds a paddle for acceleration and levers for braking to the steering wheel, leaving the car without floor pedals entirely.
On one of Shimoyama’s skid pads, I find the system tricky to operate smoothly at first, but using it eventually becomes second nature. More importantly, it leaves me feeling reassured that losing the use of my legs for some reason one day wouldn’t automatically mean losing my ability to drive a car.
Mass appeal
Toyota also lets me have a go in the IMV 0, a new petrol or diesel pickup for Asian markets designed to be cheap and easily customised. It feels relatively crude to drive, but with a target price of just US$10,000 without taxes (an insider tells me it will end up costing around 10 per cent more when it goes on sale next month) it is meant for the working masses. Think of a jeepney in the Philippines or food truck in Malaysia, and you have some idea of what life will be like for these low-cost workhorses.
That Toyota is betting on everything from a cheap pick-up truck to a “thousand cars in one” software package for BEVs can make it look worryingly unfocused, at a time when the rest of the industry is falling over itself to go all-in on electric cars.
But Toyota execs have long insisted that BEVs aren’t a silver bullet against carbon emissions. They say too much of the world is simply unable to make a sudden switch to electric cars, so a multi-pathway approach that includes hybrid cars, plug-ins, hydrogen fuel cells and even combustion hydrogen engines would have more impact on cutting its carbon footprint to zero, something it wants to achieve by 2050.
“Some OEMs have only one technology, so they will have to promote that technology,” Hao Quoc Tien, the President of Toyota Motor Asia Pacific, says, using the industry term Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to describe carmakers. “We don’t blame them, that’s how they penetrate the market.
He says Toyota’s wide footprint means it would lose business instead of gaining sales if it only pursued electric vehicles. “We sell to so many different countries and so many different customers. We have to provide them the mobility solution that fits them,” Hao says. “Otherwise, we will no longer be the preferred OEM.”
The multi-pathway approach certainly gives Toyota a much heavier workload than dedicated BEV startups. But its engineers seem to relish the challenge. At Shimoyama, the development team has every opportunity to find things that make them giggle.
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