Toyota estimates factory modernisation could need 400,000 robots from 2028

Toyota's estimate

The estimate surfaced at a technology briefing for investors at Toyota Motor Europe's headquarters in Brussels in September 2026. Reuters reported that it covers Toyota, group companies and major suppliers, includes both humanoid and non-humanoid machines, and spans replacements for existing equipment and new installations. Nikkei Asia reported that about 150,000 robots would go to Toyota's own plants and 250,000 to group companies and suppliers.

Toyota would time large-scale installations to match renovation and rebuild schedules at plants worldwide, Motor1 reported. The company operates about 60 factories globally and employs 18,000 veteran workers known as takumi, whose expertise it wants to capture as training data.

ELEY and the training plan

The humanoid at the centre is ELEY, short for Embodied Learning robot for Enhanced Yield. It weighs 50 kg, has two-fingered hands and moves on wheels powered by battery or cord rather than legs. Toyota trains it by demonstration: workers wear finger-shaped jigs modelled on the robot's hands while repeating routine tasks. At the September briefing, ELEY folded T-shirts with near-perfect accuracy after about 1,500 practice sessions over two weeks, Nikkei Asia reported.

Toyota plans to share learned data across factories so a robot that masters a task at one site can pass the skill to machines elsewhere. The company's March 2026 research flagged long-duration reliability, precise end-effector positioning and data infrastructure for a global fleet as open challenges. TechRepublic noted that a successful T-shirt fold does not establish that the system handles every unpredictable situation on a production line.

Why the number matters

Toyota executives pitch the automation as a way to keep its reliability edge over Chinese rivals, with the near-term effect for buyers being consistency rather than price, Motor1 reported. The takumi skills are also the training material: Toyota wants to capture that expertise as data before veteran workers retire, and it plans for robots to help train new employees as well as learn from existing ones. Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said in a statement: "We aim for a world where robots coexist with humans, rather than replacing them."

Cost and competition

Mechanically spreading one year's $6.4bn estimate across 400,000 machines gives about $16,000 each, but that is not a true robot cost because the budget also covers systems, infrastructure and facility upgrades, GuruFocus said in a column carried by TradingView. The Financial Times reported that Toyota is stepping up efforts to commercialise robotics after two decades of research, with senior executives promoting the initiative to investors. Hyundai, which owns Boston Dynamics, plans to deploy Atlas humanoid robots at its Georgia plant from 2028, the same year Toyota's spending could start.

What happens next

Any large-scale installations would be timed to match factory renovations and rebuilds, so the 400,000 would arrive progressively rather than all at once, TechRepublic reported. Toyota has not set a schedule or duration for any programme.