Toyota posted a 10% sales decline for its bread-and-butter brand of over the month of June, with numbers that are even worse -- an 11.5% drop -- when the Scion and Lexus brands are added into the equation. In response to these very un-Toyota-like sales declines, the automaker is now revamping its vehicle production in the States. Though it has already introduced measures to slow the production of full-size Tundra trucks and Sequoia SUVs, reports indicate the further cuts will be made at the San Antonio truck plant. The Indiana plant, which also produces Tundras, will see workers transferred to other lines where more popular vehicles are assembled. Even plants in Japan that export vehicles to the U.S. could be affected. Toyota is hardly used to seeing double-digit drops in sales in the U.S., so it will be interesting to see how the giant Japanese automaker responds in the months to come.
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.
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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