Toyota's Project ETA is answer to ‘Dude, where's my car?'

With more consumers than ever ordering vehicles or buying them sight unseen, Toyota Motor North America this year will try to shine a light into one of the darkest, most mysterious parts of the purchase: the complex logistics chain that gets new automobiles from the end of the assembly line to the dealership lot.

Toyota is by no means alone: Other automakers, including General Motors and Volkswagen, are working to make it easier for dealers and their customers to keep track of their new vehicles through the delivery process as though they came in a box and had been ordered from Amazon.

Toyota's effort, which it will introduce to Toyota and Lexus dealers at their National Automobile Dealers Association make meeting Sunday, March 13, and plans to implement this summer, is called "Project ETA" — based on the widely used acronym for "estimated time of arrival."

Project ETA seeks to do three things, according to Keith Robertson, group vice president for supply chain management at Toyota Motor North America:

1. Improve the transparency of where a vehicle is in the delivery process.

2. Provide more timely notifications to dealers if there are delays, even before production.

3. Improve the accuracy of the data that will be shared with dealers and their customers.

"We actually have been talking about it for more than two to three years — even before COVID — but once COVID hit and the inventories became tighter, it became more and more apparent to us that we need to shore up our order-to-delivery ETA processes," said Robertson.

It can't come quickly enough, says Danny Wilson, head of the Toyota National Dealer Advisory Council.

"I don't care if it's a railhead that doesn't have employees because of COVID, or it's a supplier that can't supply a part that stops a line, or all the different things that go along with that," Wilson told Automotive News. "It would be great to have some transparency so that we could tell a customer that their vehicle was going to be here in two weeks, or 10 days, or four months, whatever, but be able to update them when something changes."

Wilson said dealers have learned, especially over the past two years, "that customers are incredibly patient if you're honest and transparent and can keep them informed. And we need to do that much better."

Robertson says Project ETA will "work a lot like Domino's Pizza Tracker" when it's fully implemented, allowing dealers to keep tabs on their ordered vehicle, if they choose to do so, from pre-production right through to it being dropped off in their driveway.

Information about where a vehicle is in the production or delivery process will be presented graphically, with dealers able to sign up for notifications at individual checkpoints — for example, a vehicle has reached this railhead, or has been loaded on a truck — as the vehicle moves in the process toward the dealer.

If there's a delay, such as a parts shortage that might delay production or weather that has impacted train travel, that will be communicated as well, Robertson said. However, dealers can choose to track, or not track, as many of their ordered vehicles as they desire.

"Getting that visibility to the dealers and putting it in a way that's transparent is a huge step for us," he said. "The data has always been there; it's just not very user-friendly, so we're making it more user-friendly so that anyone at the dealership will be able to show a customer, and the customer can visually see the flow of the vehicle."

GM launched a similar effort, albeit one that uses a slightly different technology, last year with VINView, a partnership between the automaker and logistics company FreightVerify. VINView uses the GM vehicle's OnStar module to track the vehicle's physical location and shows a dealer when it has reached each point on the delivery chain. GM said VINView not only would allow dealers to track orders and keep customers updated, but uses a dashboard to let dealers match their ordering to vehicles most in-demand.

Similarly, Volkswagen National Dealer Advisory Council Chairman Tom McMenamin says that his council has been working with the German automaker to improve the accuracy of when an ordered vehicle would be delivered.

"Our [council's] biggest request right now to the brand is, 'Hey, we need an effective ETA time that we can tell our customers," McMenamin said. When a customer asks, "having no answer is not good. Having updates, whether it's a good answer or not, the customer feels informed, and they're more likely to be happy going through with the transaction."

Toyota's Robertson said that better order tracking has "been a top-five dealer concern" among Toyota and Lexus dealers for several years, especially given the Japanese automaker's long logistical chains that stretch as far as Japan. The issue "spiked to the No. 1 issue" when COVID-19 struck and dealer stocks began to shrink, he said.

"It sounds real easy, but quite frankly, it's pretty complicated," when you consider all of the various outside companies, including suppliers and logistics companies, "associated with building vehicles and moving vehicles," Robertson said.