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Toyota investing $200M in Southern manufacturing

Over the past two years, Toyota has invested more than $2 billion at its North American production facilities, and it apparently doesn't plan on stopping there. To keep up with recent strong sales, Toyota is investing an additional $200 million at its engine plants in the Southern US to increase production capacity of its V6 engines.
The bulk of this money ($150 million) will go to expand Toyota's engine plant in Huntsville, AL, which is currently responsible for supplying engines - four-cylinder, V6 and V8 - to eight of Toyota's 12 domestically produced vehicles. That includes the best-selling Toyota Camry (shown above).
Toyota didn't say exactly what improvements are being made to the plant, but this follows last year's $80 million investment in the plant that is set to be completed by next year raising the engine capacity to 750,000 annual units including 362,000 V6s. The remaining $50 million will go to the casting plants of Toyota-owned Bodine Aluminum in Missouri and Tennessee, which supply engine blocks and cylinder heads to the Huntsville engine plant as well as others in Kentucky and West Virginia. Scroll down below for the official press release.

Suzuki and Daihatsu join Toyota electric vehicle venture

TOKYO — Suzuki Motor Corp and Daihatsu are joining a commercial electric vehicle coalition led by Toyota Motor Corp, the carmakers announced on Wednesday, helping the Japanese alliance expand its focus from trucks to smaller cars. The two automakers will each acquire a 10% stake in the joint venture, on par with Isuzu Motors and Hino Motors, while Toyota will hold a 60% stake, they said. "With Suzuki and Daihatsu joining the project and working together, we'll be able to expand our circle of cooperation to not only cover commercial vehicles but also mini vehicles," said Toyota President Akio Toyoda. "With this expansion, I believe that we'll be able to take one step closer to a better mobility society," Toyoda said. The move comes as Japanese automakers face growing competition from tech giants and other rivals making electric and driverless cars. Toyota, Isuzu and Hino launched the Commercial Japan Partnership Technologies Corporation in April to bolster their competitive edge in connected, commercial vehicles. Daihatsu's president Soichiro Okudaira said joining the pact and introducing connected, mini-commercial vehicles would allow data sharing, a major benefit for companies to provide better services to customers and improve logistics efficiency. (Reporting by Eimi Yamamitsu; Writing by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Louise Heavens) Related Video: Green Suzuki Toyota Daihatsu Electric Akio Toyoda

Toyota promoting Mirai as if hydrogen tax credit never went away

At the end of December, the US federal government let the $8,000 tax credit for hydrogen-powered vehicles expire. Despite this little wrinkle, Toyota is still promoting the upcoming 2016 Mirai fuel cell vehicle as a car that will cost under $50,000. In some cases a lot less, since it may also qualify for a $5,000 incentive in California. The car has a $57,500 MSRP, but Nihar Patel, vice president of North American Business Strategy for Toyota Motor Sales, spoke at the 2015 Washington Auto Show last week, and said that the Mirai could cost $44,500 in California. You can see this in the video at around minute four. Toyota knows that the federal incentives have expired, since the real news from the show was Patel's public request to the federal government that the $8,000 tax credit be extended. "We think that the federal credit expiration last year puts [hydrogen] customers in a fairly disadvantageous postion," he said. Plug-in vehicle buyers can still get up to $7,500 tax credit and, "we believe that this inequity needs to be fixed," he said. You can see this in the video at minute 10:20. Toyota said including both the after-incentives price and the call to reinstate those incentives was intentional since it shows a discrepancy between hydrogen and plug-in vehicles in the eyes of the feds. We asked Toyota's director of Energy and Environmental Research, Technical and Regulatory Affairs, Robert Wimmer, for more details on Toyota's request. "[The Mirai] being a ZEV and battery electrics also being ZEVs, we just want to make the playing field as level as possible," he said, adding that any extension would last "for the run of the vehicle," which would be three years. He admitted that the extension might only be for one or two years, if it happens at all. (A Toyota spokesperson clarified to AutoblogGreen that the Mirai program will not end after three years.) And that's the problem. "The tax process is difficult to predict," he said. "The two challenges we have now are that both houses of Congress are Republican and also that there has been talk for a while about comprehensive tax reform. If that moves forward, then extenders would probably be put on the back burner as comprehensive tax reform is discussed." Wimmer would not reveal any details about how Toyota is pressuring the government to act, only saying that Toyota's has people lobbying up on Capitol Hill.