A visit to Toyota's production site in Valenciennes, to discover how innovation and circularity are reshaping the face of an industry.
Last March we reported on how, in the heart of the United Kingdom, in Burnaston, there is a virtuous automotive factory — a circular factory where the rules of the end of life of a car are being rewritten: a plant designed no longer to "take, make, use and discard", but to put materials and components back into circulation, closing the loop of automotive production. A demonstration of how the circular economy, at least for Toyota, is not merely a slogan but an open construction site, built on meticulous dismantling, aluminium that returns to become a new engine block, and plastics given a new lease of life.
This time the journey takes us somewhere else, but into a story with many parallels: in Valenciennes, in northern France, we visited the home of Toyota Motor Manufacturing France, one of the most innovative plants in Europe. A visit that allowed us, as we shall see shortly, to go once again behind the scenes of the automotive industry, to discover how production processes are changing profoundly — increasingly integrated and more efficient.
If Burnaston is (also) the laboratory of what happens to a car when it reaches the end of its journey, the Valenciennes site is where that journey begins: not only because the new hybrid Yaris Cross — Toyota's best-selling model in Europe — is born here, but because this is where you can experience first-hand the themes driving the Japanese brand's industrial strategy.
The first thing that strikes you on arriving in Valenciennes is the scale of the site: 18 hectares, a mere "pocket handkerchief" of land compared to other automotive plants, within which every stage of car production coexists — from raw steel sheet to finished vehicle ready for the road. Around 5,000 people work here every day, with a production capacity exceeding 1,250 vehicles per day. Our behind-the-scenes "journey" allowed us to follow step by step the making of a new car: from the press shop, where steel is transformed into body panels using precision dies, to the welding department, where advanced robotics assemble vehicle structures, through to the painting processes and final assembly.
Then on to a department that is less obvious in a car manufacturing plant: the plastics workshop, where Toyota produces many components in-house. It is a detail that speaks volumes: internalising plastics production means having greater control over quality, costs and, not least, the environmental footprint of components. A manufacturing approach that, applied in reverse, brings us back to the complex and almost artisanal disassembly of vehicles we reported from the UK site in Burnaston. Confirmation that innovation and circularity, at Toyota, share the same industrial genetic code — simply applied to two opposite ends of a car's life, which are increasingly bound together.
If the key word at Burnaston is "recovery", at Valenciennes it is "reduction". Toyota has set itself a clear objective: to bring CO₂ emissions down to zero by 2030, a goal built around four operational pillars — energy, water, waste and air, the last of these understood primarily as a reduction in solvent emissions related to the painting process. These are not vague statements of intent, but concrete interventions visible throughout our visit: advanced systems for treating wastewater, optimised heating and energy processes, and constant work on resource efficiency to reduce waste in every department.
It was a little like rediscovering in France the same spirit that animates Toyota's plants in the United Kingdom, where an increase in renewables and a reduction in energy consumption accompany a similar path towards carbon neutrality. With the added challenge that in France the production pace is very high, and maintaining energy efficiency alongside high volumes are not, in theory, objectives that automatically go hand in hand — and it is precisely here that the most interesting challenge plays out.
A brief but necessary note. At the centre of Valenciennes' industrial story is the new Yaris Cross, whose debut is expected in September: we are talking about the best-selling compact SUV in Europe. Every Yaris Cross sold in Europe comes from here. This is where hybrid efficiency and the practicality typical of a small SUV are born. More than 1,250 cars a day leave the French site, the fruit of a "symbiotic" collaboration between robots and human skills. A manufacturing operation that looks not only at volume or line speed, but at the way in which production is carried out — from the people who work there to the energy that powers it.
Looking at Burnaston and Valenciennes, a broader picture emerges. On one side, a factory that dismantles in order to recover; on the other, a factory that builds while minimising the waste of resources and emissions: two sides of the same industrial strategy, the one through which Toyota is working to make its European presence more resilient and sustainable over time. It is not a completed journey — Toyota itself acknowledges that the road towards carbon neutrality and full circularity of materials is still a long one. But it is a journey that — as our visit to the plant made very clear — is beginning to take on a recognisable shape: local, integrated, and increasingly attentive to what happens before, during and after the life of a car.