Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha

Kabushiki Kaisha Toyota Jidoshokki

Akihisa Okada

Kenji Chiba

Nobukazu Kato

Yasuhiro Hatta

Hirofumi Arima

Makoto Kato

Yosuke Yamada

Isamu Masakawa

Aaron S Park

Takeshi Okabe

Instrument panel for an automobile

A support structure for a fuel lid attached by a hinge to a vehicle body is provided with an annular rubber seal, which is provided on the vehicle body to surround an oil filler port in the vehicle body. The rubber seal has a top surface and an inner circumferential surface. The support structure includes a contact plate provided on a back surface of the fuel lid. The contact plate contacts the rubber seal when the fuel lid is in the closed state. The contact plate has an upper surface contact portion for contacting the upper surface of the rubber seal, and an inner-surface contact portion for contacting the inner circumferential surface of the rubber seal.

Support structure for fuel lid

In a joining structure of a lid box according to an embodiment of the invention, a joining area where a joining surface of a joining portion of a side outer panel faces a joining surface of a joining portion of the lid box includes a first area where the joining surfaces come into contact with each other and are supposed to be subjected to spot-welding and a second area where the joining surfaces are separated from each other by a predetermined gap and are supposed to be subjected to laser-welding, and the spot-welding is performed on the first area or the laser-welding is performed on the second area. For that reason, since the joining states respectively suitable for the spot-welding and the laser-welding are realized, sufficient welding quality is ensured in both the spot-welding and the laser-welding.

Lid box joining structure and joining method

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Kariya, Japan

Akihisa Okada