"The heartbeat of Japan"

In these final days of our adventure in Japan, we are enjoying some free weekdays, seeing some sights in our area that we have missed so far. Yesterday we took a tour of a Toyota car factory in Toyota City, which is nearby. This plant makes the economy-rescuing Prius, the Camry, plus two models i don't think we have in N.A., the Allion and the Premio.

The factory is amazingly huge, covering acres and acres of land. It was the first Toyota factory to reduce its landfill trips to zero, plus it recycles water, purifying it and sending it back to the river from whence it came, and tons of iron waste from welding are recycled into new material.
Here's Mandy in the IQ, a new model that seems to be Toyota's answer to the smart car, but this one has a back seat, which is almost a waste of effort in such a tiny car. I don't know if this model has come to North America yet.

This is the showroom lobby as seen from the museum gift shop on the second floor. The trumpet playing robot does a show a few times a day, which is pretty cool. The wheeled thing in the background is a car of the future, which stands up tall and is mobile that way, and it also transforms into a low-riding sports mobile on the go. It was really busy earlier in the day, but the robot seems to be performing for two this time. Oh well, robots' feelings can't get hurt, at least not yet. Some day though, i think we'll have to be careful about what we say around vending machines and parking meters.

We couldn't take our cameras into the factory and assembly lines, but of course, someone has, and i found a cool video of the welding robots. This is pretty much exactly as we saw it in the Japanese factory.