Toyota gets technology to market, like hybrid cards, faster than others because they modularise.

For any given car and model year, each component has the conservative option that worked last year, and more innovative ones that are up to 10-years ahead of the industry. To make this work, the interfaces between the modules are agreed between component teams, then the teams themselves canoperate opaquely. If the innovation requires the interface to change, they fall back on the conservative option, and re-agree on a new interface for the following model year.