Toyota plans 400,000 factory robots, $6.4B annual spend from 2028

Toyota has outlined plans to deploy around 400,000 robots across its global manufacturing network, with an estimated annual investment of roughly 1 trillion yen ($6.4 billion) starting in 2028, in what would be one of the auto industry's largest automation pushes.

A Factory Overhaul at Scale

The estimate, first reported by Nikkei Asia, surfaced at a technology briefing for investors at Toyota Motor Europe's headquarters in Brussels, where executives demonstrated the company's in-house humanoid robot platform. The 400,000-robot figure breaks down to approximately 150,000 units at Toyota's own plants and about 250,000 at supplier and partner sites across the automaker's roughly 60 production facilities worldwide.motor1+2

The robots would include both humanoid and non-humanoid machines, covering replacements for aging equipment alongside new installations. Toyota has not committed to the full spending level or specified how many years the program would run, framing the figure as an internal projection rather than a firm commitment.finance.yahoo+2

Robots as Partners, Not Replacements

Central to Toyota's pitch is coexistence between machines and the veteran workers the company calls takumi — master craftspeople whose skills were honed over decades. "We aim for a world where robots coexist with humans, rather than replacing them," Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima told Nikkei Asia.finance.yahoo

One key piece of the plan is ELEY (Embodied Learning robot for Enhanced Yield), a battery-powered wheeled robot weighing about 50 kilograms that uses Large Behavior Models to learn tasks from a small number of human demonstrations. Toyota intends to centralize the data these robots gather from experienced workers, preserving institutional knowledge that might otherwise be lost to retirements and using it to train both future robots and new employees.just-auto+2

An Industry-Wide Trend

Toyota is not alone. Hyundai, which owns Boston Dynamics, plans to begin deploying humanoid robots at its Georgia plant from 2028. BMW Bayerische Motoren Werke AG uses AEON AI robots in Germany and South Carolina, while Mercedes-Benz deploys quadruped robots for quality control. Tesla ↗ 4.23% continues developing its multi-purpose Optimus robot.autojosh+1

Toyota would time robot installations to coincide with factory renovations and new model introductions, an approach consistent with the company's long-standing aversion to disruption on working production lines. Whether the automaker ultimately reaches the 400,000 figure remains an open question — but the scale of the projection signals how central automation has become to the next era of carmaking.inkl+1