Toyota City, Japan―Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Group companies recently announced that they are now engaged in full-scale production of medical face shields.

The former is largely expanding its production capacity from 500 – 600 units per week by about 20 times more to start producing 40,000 units of face shields per month or about 2,000 units per day which started last April 27.

Toyota even plans to further expand in-house production to about 70,000 pieces per month, which is estimated 3,600 pieces per day.

Toyota Motor East Japan, Inc. has already repurposed into medical face shields production, providing 3,000 units to Miyagi Prefecture last April 20.

Other Toyota Group companies in the list include Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd., Daihatsu Motor Co., Ltd. and Hino Motors, Ltd., which have all started trial production.

Daihatsu and Hino are now providing medical face shields to medical facilities in their immediate areas.

Moreover; Toyota Industries Corporation likewise plans to produce 10,000 units per month, while Toyota Auto Body Co., Ltd. is considering to start its production by mid-May.

The Toyota Group is taking this initiative of supporting the relentless efforts of medical frontliners in caring and treating patients for COVID-19 around-the-clock as part of the company’s “Kokoro Hakobu Project”.

At the onset, the group intends to prioritize the provision of its medical face shields to healthcare facilities and local governments in their own localities.

To date, there have been enormous production efforts and the following shows the capacities of each firm under the Toyota Group companies:

Toyota Industries Corporation (plant: Kyowa, production capacity: 500/day, production start: April 29); Toyota Motor Corporation (plant: Teiho and Motomachi, production capacity: 2,000/day, production start: April 13); Toyota Motor East Japan, Inc. (plant: Miyagi Ohira, production capacity: 600/day, production start: April 20)

Toyota and Toyota Group companies vowed that they will do whatever they can to help in healthcare treatment efforts in curbing the further spread of the virus.