As reported recently, even though Toyota halted Tundra production for a while, the company pledged not to lay off its workers. At a total cost of potentially $1 billion to the company, Toyota instead placed the employees in retraining and civic works programs during a Kaizen and Development Period.
What kinds of civic programs? One of them, in San Antonio, is called the City-Toyota Green Clean-Up Project, which has put up to 340 workers on the streets to "clean, paint, and plant." Factory staffers have painted curbs, picnic tables and trash cans, trimmed trees and plants, and cleaned up lots. While employees do want to get back to the factories, they're enjoying the time away and being able to give back to the city -- all the while earning their regular wages and benefits.
A second round of city improvement will begin next month. After that, Toyota expects to have all hands on deck again at the factory in November, building 2009-model-year Tundras.
The Toyota Tundra is the most competent pickup Toyota has ever produced, but the two-year-old truck has been hit hard by the harsh reality of the US auto slump. Gas prices and a sluggish housing industry have conspired to put a wet blanket on the Tundra party, and the San Antonio plant will be closed from August 8 until mid-November to allow dealers to clear out Tundra inventory. When the Texas plant does come back online, a portion of its production could wind up overseas.
At the Management Briefing Seminars, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky Inc. President Steve St. Angelo said some Tundras and Sequoias could be produced in the US and shipped overseas. While markets like Europe and Asia aren't likely to turn to trucks and SUVs in large numbers, both the Tundra and Sequoia could be a welcomed addition in the Middle East, where cheap gas prices makes big vehicles more acceptable. While the overseas truck market isn't likely to produce huge demand for the Tundra and Sequoia, the currently untapped markets could help the San Antonio plant come closer to running at its peak efficiency.
Toyota's got some changes and rearranges underway with its North American facilities to better serve the demands of the market. The biggest news is that Prius production will be coming Stateside, which will help unkink the supply pipeline, if not also lower costs. A new facility in Blue Springs, Mississippi is being readied for the battery-pack-mobile, though the location was initially meant to turn out Highlanders. With consumer desires shifting with the rise of fuel prices, cranking out more Priuses is a higher priority, and beginning in fall 2009, the Highlander will shuffle off to Princeton, Indiana. With the Highlander elbowing its way into the Princeton plant, the vehicle currently produced there, the Tundra, will see its production move under a single roof in San Antonio, Texas.
The big-truck moves are of little consequence when the plants are scheduled to be idled beginning August 8th due to lack of demand. Huntsville, Alabama will also hold up on cranking out V8 engines. While Toyota is putting some plants in neutral, it pledges to provide employment to affected team members during the shutdown. All of this shuffling is an attempt by Toyota to avoid sustaining humongous hits as the market for new cars takes a dump, as well as ensuring that the products it remains building match up with consumer desires. Always a good thing to make the things people want.
The full-size pickup truck woes continue to worsen, leaving even mighty Toyota little choice but to slow production of its Tundra model. In fact, Toyota's brand new plant in San Antonio that was built just for the Tundra will be shutting down a total of 14 days between now and October. Full-time workers at the plant will be able to use vacation days, take the time off unpaid or find something else at the plant to do while the assembly line is halted.
Unfortunately, temp-to-hire workers aren't so lucky. Two-hundred employees who were hoping to land full-time positions at the plant will be laid off this summer. Toyota spokesman Mike Goss says, "We have a very long-term view of that factory in Texas. We're trying not to overreact. We're trying not to shut it down." Whoa... back up. Shut it down? We hadn't heard any such thing until it was spoken by Goss. Sounds like things are just as bad for Toyotas with beds as they are for pickups from Detroit.
Toyota has earned its reputation for producing fuel efficient vehicles, but one dent in the Japanese automaker's armor has been the gas-guzzling Tundra and Sequoia. To help rectify the situation, Toyota Engineers have been working hard on a 4.5L clean-diesel powerplant that will substantially improve fuel economy for the body-on-frame trucks. The 4.5L engine is reportedly scheduled to arrive Stateside by 2010, and it's a no-brainer in light of the fact that both Ford and GM are offering similarly sized oil-burners for their trucks and SUVs.
You may remember the Dually Tundra fantasy truck that was shown last year at SEMA. Well, this news means the mega-sized diesel may not be far from reality. Inside Line is also reporting that Toyota may be delivering a monstrous 7.0L diesel for a commercial-grade Tundra, with a possible production date around 2011-2012. Toyota still hasn't given the go-ahead for a heavy duty Tundra, so the king-sized diesel powerplant likely will arrive only if the larger Tundra does, too.
Although Toyota has recently claimed the title of the World's Largest Automaker in terms of global sales, the Japanese-giant is finding out that life at the top isn't all it's cracked-up to be. While the Camry, Corolla, Yaris and Prius sedans are reportedly brisk movers, the same thing cannot be said about Toyota's line of trucks and sport utility vehicles. Toyota has cut Tundra and Sequoia production already, but dealers are still declining to purchase them, pushing the number of unclaimed units to an all-time high. Automotive News quotes an unnamed Toyota dealer as saying, "Last month, Southeast Toyota had 9,700 vehicles that had been turned down twice by dealers and are either sitting at the port or at sea. That's a significant number." Right now, Toyota/Scion has a high 58-day supply of available inventory on hand.
Some dealers, though, see the high number of available units as a blessing-in-disguise. "We've been asking for more inventory for two years and now we finally got it. This is a great opportunity. You have to take it when you can get it," says Steve Cain, general manager of Lewis Toyota-Scion in Topeka, Kansas. Regardless of your viewpoint, we expect that Toyota will align itself with market realities in order to bring production in line with actual sales sooner rather than later. In other words, if you've been in the market for a Toyota truck, chances are good you'll get a decent deal.
As of today, production of the Tundra full-size pickup is split between Toyota's facility in Princeton, Indiana, and the automaker's brand new San Antonio plant in Texas. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Toyota is considering moving all production of the Tundra to just the Texas plant. Just over two weeks ago, Toyota announced it was slowing production on the Tundra (and Sequoia) due to lagging sales. The move to consolidate all Tundra manufacturing in one location may be seen as a sign Toyota only expects to sell 200,000 full-size units or less this year, as that number represents the production capacity of the Texas facility. You may remember that Toyota boldly claimed it would sell 200,000 units of the Tundra in 2007, the newly redesigned truck's first year of sales. It missed that target, but not by much with 196,555 units sold. Toyota hasn't officially commented on the rumor yet, but we'll let you know when it breaks the silence.
In a rare move for Toyota, the auto company will be slowing production of the Tundra pickup and the Sequoia SUV due to lagging sales. Last year, Toyota sold 196,555 Tundra's, which was just a bit shy of their stated goal of 200,000. Still, it was enough to make the Tundra the fourth-best-selling truck in America, and very close to the GMC Sierra at third. Significantly, those 196,555 sales represent a 57-percent gain in Tundra sales as compared to 2006. Still, Toyota is not selling as many Tundra's as they had hoped, forcing them to slow down their production cycle. Last month, Toyota sold over 10,000 fewer Tundra's than they are capable of producing. No jobs will be lost at either the Princeton, Indiana plant or the San Antonio, Texas plant where Tundra's and Sequoia's are built.
Those in the market for a new truck are very close to welcoming the redesigned '09 Ford F-150 and '09 Dodge Ram to the stable of choices. Despite this announcement, we're nowhere near ready to count Toyota out, and we're sure that they are well aware that they are in the middle of an uphill battle where consumers will have more quality pickups to choose from than ever before.
Congrats to the Toyota Tundra. It has just been named "Truck of the Year" by Farm Industry News, a leading product and technology magazine for "high-income, Midwestern farmers" (their words, not ours). Though an accolade from FIM doesn't carry as much weight with normal shoppers as does a pair of golden calipers from Motor Trend, the award is still significant. As automakers watch buyers turn away from trucks as lifestyle vehicles, the endorsement of a magazine read by people who actually use a truck for its intended purpose has its own gravitas.
Then again, just how does a farm magazine determine the truck of the year? In the case of Farm Industry News, you simply add up all of the reader responses to product information (you know, those tear-out cards) and determine which is most popular. Considering the Toyota Tundra was all-new last year, it probably goes without saying that it was going to make the biggest splash!
There's the pickup truck market in the U.S. as a whole, and then there's the pickup truck market in Texas where one in seven of all trucks in this country is sold. Aside from its gluttonous appetite for full-size trucks, Texas is also a symbolic battleground where domestic automakers have long been been waging war for the mindshare of good old boys who represent their typical truck buyer. Enter the new Toyota Tundra, which last year saw its sales in Texas climb by an impressive 79 percent in Texas, while sales of domestic pickups shrank by 5%. The Tundra's increase even outpaced the truck's performance on a national scale, where its sales rose by 54%. While we couldn't find raw numbers for pickup sales in Texas last year and therefore can't know if the Tundra climbed a few spots on the best-seller list, it no doubt stole a good chunk of buyers from its Detroit-based competition.
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