Case Study: Toyota accelerates ECU development and cuts R&D costs with MathWorks

MATLAB And Simulink Help Toyota Design For The Future

Toyota faced mounting pressure to speed up design, raise quality, and cut R&D costs while traditional methods relied on costly hardware prototypes and repeated re‑engineering. To close these gaps, Toyota partnered with MathWorks and adopted MATLAB, Simulink, Simulink Coder, and Stateflow to create executable specifications that consolidate spec writing, control design, and programming.

MathWorks’ tools let Toyota model, simulate, test, and autocode production C in a single environment, supporting hardware‑in‑the‑loop and rapid prototyping workflows with dSPACE. The result: streamlined ECU development with shorter design cycles and fewer prototypes, deployment of more than 400 licenses, and auto‑generated code that was only about 5% larger and ~15% slower than handwritten C—enabling faster, cheaper releases including work on Toyota’s hybrid electric vehicle.

Toyota

Akira Ohata

Spokesperson