Humanoid robots are reshaping the factory floor, especially in China. Toyota is joining the bandwagon, targeting 400,000 units to modernize its production infrastructure. Can the bots take over from humans?

Toyota has told investors it may need 400,000 robots and roughly 1 trillion yen ($6.4 billion) a year from 2028 to upgrade its factories. The estimate surfaced at a technology briefing for investors at Toyota Motor Europe’s headquarters in Brussels.

Also at suppliers

This high number of bots aren’t strictly employed in the carmaker’s own plant. While 150,000 of them will do so, 250,000 units will be activated across group companies and major suppliers. Not all of them are humanoid robots with electronically actuated limbs. The number includes conventional industrial machines and replacements for aging equipment.

But, of course, the most interesting machine is Toyota’s ELEY, short for Embodied Learning robot for Enhanced Yield. It weighs 50 kilograms, runs on wheels, and operates two-fingered hands.

ELEY uses Large Behavior Models to learn tasks from a small number of human demonstrations, including skills drawn from takumi workers. Takumi are veteran craftspeople whose hands-on expertise has taken decades to build. Worldwide, Toyota employs 18,000 of these ‘elite’ workers.

Humans for final judgments

Toyota says these robots will handle repetitive or physically demanding work and stresses that these robots are partners, not replacements. The Japanese car maker claims humans cannot be substituted as they have trained eyes needed to make final judgments.

So, the scale might be striking, but it is not being put in place to eliminate the human workforce. Where rivals often frame automation as a labor-cost solution, Toyota frames it as a quality-control tool. At its Strategy Update last week, Volvo pointed to automation to keep labor costs under control at its Ghent plant.

Interestingly, Ford recently backed off from AI-embedded quality control in its American factories, bringing back human engineers to do the job. Results from the automated system have remained underwhelming, not meeting expectations so far.

Then again, Ford has had to cope with quality issues that must sound alienating compared with Toyota’s standards, which often surface as the top car builder in dependability studies.

Beating China

Choosing Brussels, Toyota Motor Europe’s headquarters, for the investor briefing is not incidental. The carmaker operates eight manufacturing plants across the old continent. The automation effort is as much a European story as it is an Asian one.

The company told investors the spending would start in 2028 without specifying how many years it would run. Ultimately, Toyota’s plan is to keep its edge against fast-growing Chinese rivals by maintaining its high-quality profile, but making it more efficient to battle China Speed.