Toyota details its COVID-19 fight

Toyota Australia has developed and produced a face shield for hospital staff to aid the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The approved and tested face shields started distribution this week, Toyota confirmed on Sunday morning, weeks after carsales.com.au first revealed Toyota’s involvement in fighting the coronavirus in March.

Face shields are one of the key PPE (personal protective equipment) required by medical personnel dealing with the highly contagious virus.

"Every day, these people are literally putting their lives on the line to deal with this situation and we at Toyota have the advanced technology, design and manufacturing expertise to rapidly develop and produce the essential protective supplies they need," said Toyota Australia Vice President of Sales and Marketing Sean Hanley in a statement.

In addition to producing the face shields, the team at Toyota is studying other products, including a hyperbaric hood that could potentially be rapidly developed, prototyped and manufactured locally to meet the needs of the medical community.

Toyota is also supplying 150 meals per day from its headquarters kitchen in Melbourne for distribution to healthcare workers.

The face shield project was initiated through a partnership with 3DEME (3D Emergency Medical Equipment), an organisation established to accurately identify the critical needs of hospitals in Victoria and coordinate the rapid design, prototyping, testing and manufacture of such equipment locally.

The face shields were designed and prototyped in-house by Toyota's Product Planning and Development (PP&D) team in Port Melbourne using Computer Aided Design (CAD).

A production line using high-precision CNC routers to cut the design has also been established in the PP&D facility with the help of the Toyota Production System Support Centre (TSSC).

The production line is able to produce a face shield every minute, currently delivering to hospitals around Melbourne to help meet the enormous demand for medical protective wear.

Toyota has forecast initial materials and labour for approximately 2000 face shields to be produced and donated free of charge to various hospitals around Melbourne. The team is in talks to scale up to significantly higher volumes with the help of manufacturing partners and suppliers.

Toyota is one of a number of Australian automotive businesses contributing to the fight against the pandemic, which has – as of Sunday – claimed 81 lives in Australia and more than 200,000 globally.

Others involved include Ford Australia, Walkinshaw Group, Premcar and Bosch Australia.

Supercars racing teams Erebus Motorsport and Triple Eight Race Engineering have also respectively developed PPE and ventilators.