America can't get enough of the Prius. To meet demand, Toyota will begin building the gas – electric four-door in the U.S. in late 2010 (yes, at the same time the Volt is supposed to debut). ToMoCo'll use the plant they're building in Blue Springs, Mississippi– originally destined for Highlander production. Highlanders are moving to the Princeton, Indiana plant starting in late '09. To make room for the Highlander, they'll shift Indiana Tundra production to San Antonio, consolidating Tundra production in Spring 2009. But before they do that, they'll shut down all Tundra production from August 8 until early November (lagging sales). Toyota says they'll continue to provide work for the non-union "team members" at both facilities, as well as those working at the Huntsville, Ala. plant that builds Tundra and Sequoia engines.
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What plant(s) are currently producing the Prius. Where are they made now?
More importantly how much will this increase availability of the Prius in the US and will it affect quality?
Anyone care to wager which vehicle (US Prius or Volt) hits the streets first?
Current Prius comes from Toyota City, Tsutsumi, Japan.
This is confusing. The Highlander is a unibody as I understand it. Moving all Tundra production out of Princeton will leave the Sequoia as the only BOF vehicle made there. From what I’ve read, there are two lines at Princeton; one where the Tundra and Sequoia have been made and another line where the unibody Sienna has been made. It’s been my understanding that you can’t mix BOF/unibody on the same line. Anybody know if this is true?
I just saw a truck load on the way home last night. The positive side about Toyota (and Honda) is that they are non-union. But does the Prius have to look that ugly to achieve it’s mpg?
Sorry, I think the Prius looks very nice. I always thought the Scion that looks like a cardboard box with wheels was the one that looked ugly (though I’ve heard from the best and brightest that it was fun to drive).
dhanson865
What plant(s) are currently producing the Prius. Where are they made now?
Currently they’re all built in Japan.
I know TTAC does a lot of PR to promote the idea that they’re negative about all automakers, not just the Detroiters, but then they go and do this.
You ate into Toyota’s press release just like they wanted.
You focused the headline and commentary on the Prius’ move to the U.S. (which is indeed big news), but then nearly disregard that Toyota won’t produce a single Tundra or Sequoia for three months.
That’s worthy of its own story. Toyota knew that, but they put it in with Prius news to make the story seem less than it is and to put the focus on Toyota’s green vehicles instead of the billions it invested into BOF trucks and SUVs.
I thought you guys were sharper than this?
Buick61
You focused the headline and commentary on the Prius’ move to the U.S. (which is indeed big news), but then nearly disregard that Toyota won’t produce a single Tundra or Sequoia for three months.
I stand by Frank’s editorial choice in this story. Any further debate should be directed my way via email.
Airhen:
non-union is a positive thing? hmmm – u see how ugly the cars are! Union workers make much prettier cars!
Indeed the big news is that Toyota is shutting down all Tundra production for three months, which means mothballing the new $2 Billion factory in San Antonio during that time. Toyota has even recreated the infamous Detroit/UAW jobs bank by continuing to have everyone show up for work even when there is nothing to build.
Toyota has indeed become “America’s Car Company” in ways both good and bad.
I don’t watch many TV ads, thanks to Tivo, but I happened to see a Toyota ad last night …. for the Sequoia of all things. Lovely images of a large (all white bread) family pilling in for a trip to the mountains, towing the Airstream and generally luxuriating. Proud statements about the Sequoia being a Full Size SUV struck me as completely off key with the tunes of the day. Shuttered factories, too many models, workers paid to do nothing and clueless advertising? Maybe Jim Press really is missed over there ??????????
jerseydevil Says:
non-union is a positive thing? hmmm – u see how ugly the cars are! Union workers make much prettier cars!
Yea, nothing is as purty as the Saturn Outlook, Pontiac G5, or Chrysler Sebring. Sure feel bad for the Mazda CX-9, Honda Civic, and Nissan Altima having to fend off those beauties.
(from the guy who bought one of the last union built Ford Rangers from Ford’s Edison, NJ plnat)
Is ToMoCo banking on a Volt-targeted tax benefit for domestically produced hybrids? Perhaps sometime around… oh, say 2010?
Yeah sure Toyota is idling a few plants for its biggest cars.
But is it really a big story? Cause unlike the Big 3 Toyota is still making money. Is adjusting to market reality really this dark secret Toyota is hiding? Cause it sounds like they are displaying some incredible flexibility with these moves, and hell not laying off a factory staff for a 3 month idle is probably better than pissing off an entire factories staff when you plan on bringing them back pretty quickly. The fundamental fact of the matter is that Toyota is a healthy, massively profitable company, and this whole truck thing amounts to less money than GM has burned through in 2008.
So yeah…
I, for one, am extremely happy to here this news. My company is Tier 1 supplier to Toyota. Nearly all of the vehicles we make parts for have seen a significant drop in volume. I don’t know what volume they plan for the domestically produced Prius, but should we get the business, it should offset some of the business lost by the current market contraction. Its a good day to work for a Japanese company.
I guess now we’ll find out if the build quality is better, the same, or worse for Priora made in the US.
Ummm, isn’t all this because they are shutting down Tundra for 3 months?
Toyota Dealers have Tundras coming out their ears, that should be a newsworthy story. The rest of the press release is simply spin.
???
jerseydevil Says:
July 10th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Airhen:
hmmm – u see how ugly the cars are! Union workers make much prettier cars!
The best thing that can happen to the Big 2.8 is to break the UAW. In my home state of Indiana, Honda is coming in to build Civics among other cars, that no UAW built car can match. Sorry pal.
Oh, I own two Jeeps btw.
You focused the headline and commentary on the Prius’ move to the U.S. (which is indeed big news), but then nearly disregard that Toyota won’t produce a single Tundra or Sequoia for three months.
That’s not really a story. Toyota has flexible plants and they are changing production to match demand. That sort of flexibility is one of the primary advantages of using a lean production system.
It’s a strength, not a weakness. If you want to make unflattering comparisons, it wouldn’t be difficult — there is no way that a Detroit automaker could shut down for a few months and drastically modify its lineup to cope with the market.
Instead, the Detroit “solution” is to idle plants, lay off large numbers of workers (who they presumably spent time, money and effort to train) and to sit like a deer caught in the headlights with no products to sell. This sort of move shows the superiority of the foreign competition to manage through changing times, not the opposite.
Toyota has even recreated the infamous Detroit/UAW jobs bank by continuing to have everyone show up for work even when there is nothing to build.
Toyota has indeed become “America’s Car Company” in ways both good and bad.
Japanese companies have striven for decades to maintain stable employment in their own home markets. Layoffs are an American concept that Japanese companies have largely tried to avoid. One reason why Ghosn was brought in to fix Nissan was that he was willing to make the closures and layoffs that Japanese managers would not.
Unless Toyota plans on shrinking, letting go large numbers of employees would be a bad idea. They invested considerable resources training and cultivating that workforce. It would be more costly and disruptive to can everyone and rehire new people than to keep good workers paid and ready to build the next product.
That’s a more profitable mentality than is treating workers like dirt, which encourages them to unionize and demand more from managers who they don’t trust. GM should take notes, they have never gotten this right.
dhanson865 Says:
July 10th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Sorry, I think the Prius looks very nice
We’ll car owners tend to look like their cars (like is said about dog owners), so beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ;)
jerseydevil Says:
non-union is a positive thing? hmmm – u see how ugly the cars are! Union workers make much prettier cars!
I have spent the last four minutes trying to figure out how this makes any sense. And I have failed.
@Buick and Rodriguez:
You two are joking, right? Toyota has a car that people want, but can’t sell to them because they don’t have enough. That’s miles ahead of whatever your favored brands are at right now. They figure out a solution to hurt as few people as possible (gotta justify their existence in the economy and country to the xenophobes), and yet you refuse to recognize that.
mel23 Says:
… It’s been my understanding that you can’t mix BOF/unibody on the same line. Anybody know if this is true?
Ford mixed BOF and unibody on one line at the Wixom plant (now closed). At one time, that plant was building the unibody Lincoln LS, the unibody Ford Thunderbird and the BOF Lincoln Town Car on the same line.
John Horner “Indeed the big news is that Toyota is shutting down all Tundra production for three months, which means mothballing the new $2 Billion factory in San Antonio during that time. Toyota has even recreated the infamous Detroit/UAW jobs bank by continuing to have everyone show up for work even when there is nothing to build. Toyota has indeed become “America’s Car Company” in ways both good and bad”.
Tell me John what kind of workforce will Toyota have if they regularly just shut down for 3 months without pay. When they restart up how many will they have to replace? How many wouldn’t even have started there because of that sort of expected regularly occurring pay loss.
Theoretically they could pay minimum wage or even 8 to 10 dollars an hour and no healthcare. Why don’t they? Maybe its because they desire high quality work so they feel they have to pay more for it. Don’t forget without rigid work rules they can be utilized in almost any fashion. I once read that in Japan they sent line workers out to dealerships to do work when it was slow.
We can only hope Toyota is shuffling space to make way for iQ production.
mel23
Very interesting comment. If true, why would Ford close what appears to have been set up as one of its most flexible assembly facilities?
It will be interesting to know exactly what Toyota will have these workers do. I’ll bet it will be much better for the worker and the company, than the jobs bank.
I think I can answer your question Mullholland, about why Ford shut down Wixom. There was too little demand for the vehicles built there; the Thunderbird got the chop; Ford originally was going to kill the Town Car but since there was an outcry by “limousine” company owners and a few dealers, they moved it to Canada where the (fleet/cop car only) LTD and (blue hair special) Mercury Marquis are built. This is because the Lincoln Town Car is a stretched Panther platform, so it was easy to move alongside the other Panther platform cars.
The Panther platform dates from the fall of 1978, a new 1979 model year introduction. Yeah, Jimmy Carter was Prez. It was rebodied once, the body engineering work done on contract in the United Kingdom, and re-engined once, moving from the old Windsor 302 (5.0) V8 to the modular OHC V8. I had a 1991 Town Car, first year of the OHC V8, and it was a total POS.
The Wixom plant was actually newer than the Wayne Michigan plant, a few miles south; the Wixom plant (originally built for the all-new unit body 1958 Lincoln and distant cousin all-new unit body 1958 Thunderbird) came on-line in the fall of 1957, and Wayne (originally a Mercury plant) came on line in 1953.
My father worked as a repairman (of cars at the end of the line) at Wayne in the late summer of 1957, when Ford Motor added senior (Corsair, Citation) EDSEL production alongside Mercury production at one plant for the whole world (“Junior” 1958 Edsels were based on Ford platforms and were built in multiple plants, at least one of which was “Edsel only”).
By spring, he was laid off; the Edsel was a flop, as we all know. There was no unemployment nor any income for car workers laid off at that time. By late summer 1958, he was recalled to Wixom to help built Thunderbirds because demand was high (it was pretty much the only success for Ford in a down year). He left and quit building cars by 1959.
Wayne builds (er, well, maybe) frame-body SUVs on one side the the massive plant right now and Ford Focus cars on the other side. It’s split right in the middle, so to speak; two factories under one roof. F150’s come from River Rouge a few miles east (well, for now, anyway).
Actually I think it is smart that Toyota is hanging onto the San Antonio employees, assuming that the plant will some day be reconfigured to make things people now want. But that is indeed the big question, yes? San Antonio is NOT a flexible manufacturing line. It was purpose built to make full sized pick-up trucks. Certainly it would be easy to move Sequoia production there, but it would probably only take a month’s worth of output to produce all the Sequoias Toyota can hope to sell in a year.
As to what the workers do for three months of no production, it boggles the mind. Hopefully they were already highly trained. The factory is less than two years old and thus shouldn’t need much painting and other maintenance. Maybe they will set up a phone bank and take customer service calls? Also, one of the little secrets of full-employment companies like Toyota is that they use sub-contractors and suppliers as a buffer to keep the full time company employees on payroll. When times are good, sub-contractors are added and outside suppliers get more business. When times are bad, all the pain is felt outside the company walls. Do you think Toyota is going to keep bringing in components to San Antonio to keep it’s suppliers employees working? How about all of the contractors and temps who are now showing up to work every day? Goners they are, go on unemployment they must.
Toyota’s push to build and sell everything imaginable in bitting them in the *** right now and has led to very Detroit like situation.
Detroit longs to have the Toyota’s problems.
Hell, if you promise them Toyota’s problems, you could probably get a few first born children out of the deal.
mel23 Says:
… It’s been my understanding that you can’t mix BOF/unibody on the same line. Anybody know if this is true?
The Indiana East plant has a flexible line that can accomodate both types.
mfgreen40 Says:
It will be interesting to know exactly what Toyota will have these workers do. I’ll bet it will be much better for the worker and the company, than the jobs bank.
Primarily kaizen (continuous improvement). I guess maintenance and cleaning if opportunities for that are exhausted.
Pardon me while I laugh at everybody who’s defending Toyotas job banks, especially after the UAW was roasted over the coals for doing the same thing.
Pardon my cynicism somebody inquires about what work these employees will doing while truck production is halted.
Pardon my dismay at everybody who applauds Toyota retaining employees they can’t use, especially when they tell other employees in this industry who fret about their job security, “hey, that’s the breaks in this business, you can’t expect to keep the same job forever!”
Laughter’s the best medicine, you guys make me feel better already.
Actually, scratch that. I believe the Sequioa will stay in the West plant and the Highlander will just replace the Tundra there. I guess they will have to do some major retooling to get that to work out – fun fun!
Good news for Miss.!!
Toyota is committed to the U.S./N.A. market. They make money here!
Large SUV’ s are dead and mid size are near death. Fuel prices will continue to rise, Princeton will still have to idle for awhile next year as well. Highlander, Sienna, and Sequoia will be not in great demand in the near future.
kjc117 Says: “Large SUV’ s are dead and mid size are near death.”It’s actually the other way around. Mid-size SUVs, with fuel mileage nearly as bad as full-size SUVs yet without the larger carrying capacity, is where the real sales’ losses are as those buyers move to smaller, more fuel efficient ‘cute utes’. The biggest stockpiles of SUVs aren’t the full-size, but the Explorers, Trailblazers, Durangos, and 4Runners. Mid-size SUVs are also getting discounts and incentives nearly as great as the more expensive full-size.
The full-size SUVs, while still losing major sales, too, still maintain a relatively solid (although small) base of buyers who will continue to buy them whatever the price of fuel might be. It’s the mid-size SUV market that has completely evaporated.
I’m somewhat surprised that the San Antonio plant was intentionally designed to produce BOF vehicles only. Isn’t Toyota the company that has a brace of mystics and psychics telling them what oil markets and public perception are going to do a few years before they happen?
Hmm. I expected something similar, but I expected the Prius to go to NUMMI in California, moving the Tacoma to their Mexican plant only. I thought Arnie was trying to talk them into doing that; I guess he failed. Maybe they didn’t want GM to get any info about it’s production. The Mississippi plant should have significant production capability (more so than NUMMI); I would not expect any shortages of Priuses after it comes on line. I’m also kind of surprised that the Sequoia isn’t moving to Texas with the Tundra.
Quasimondo show me a post where I dissed GM or Ford or Chrysler due to the jobs bank.
Geotpf Says:
I’m also kind of surprised that the Sequoia isn’t moving to Texas with the Tundra.
That’s what I first thought, too. But that would leave the West plant with frightfully little work. Especially when you consider that Tundra is leaving in the spring and Highlander won’t get there until around summer/fall, as far as I understand.