Chrysler, Mitsubishi Set to Pick U.S. Car Plant Site
One of two auto assembly plant sweepstakes is expected to end in a couple of weeks when Mitsubishi and Chrysler Corp. announce their choice for the location of a joint manufacturing operation.
At stake is a $500-million plant capable of producing 180,000 cars a year and employing 2,500 persons. It is scheduled to begin operation in the fall of 1988 and reach peak production by the end of 1989. The cars are expected to be subcompacts and include engines and transaxles built in Japan by Mitsubishi.
The two companies Wednesday denied published reports in the past two days that a site in Illinois had been chosen.
“We have not made a final decision,” said Chrysler Corp. spokesman Doug Heath in Detroit.
Officials in Ohio and Illinois, two of the four states considered to be front-runners for the plant, said that they have been told the announcement would come the week of Oct. 7, but Heath would say only that it was expected before the middle of the month.
Besides Ohio and Illinois, Indiana and Michigan are under consideration by Mitsubishi, which is handling the site-selection process for the new joint-venture company, Mitsubishi spokesman Harvey Farr said.
Less is known publicly about the competition for the other plant, a Toyota factory that will produce 200,000 Camry-sized cars a year. Without disclosing the sources of his information, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) said recently that Toyota was considering sites in Robertson, Montgomery and Bedford counties, all in the Nashville, Tenn., area.
A spokesman at Toyota’s U.S. headquarters in California, Art Garner, would neither confirm nor deny that, but he said the company had sent detailed questionnaires to about 30 states, counties and municipalities regarding possible sites.
The Toyota assembly plant is to go into operation in 1988 along with another to be built in Canada capable of producing 50,000 cars a year. Garner said that Toyota hopes to announce a U.S. plant site before the end of this year.
“There’s no deadline,” he said, “but obviously we need to be moving pretty quickly to meet an ’88 production date.”
Perhaps because of their more ordinary nature, the competition for the Mitsubishi-Chrysler and Toyota plants has proceeded with considerably less hoopla than that for the General Motors Saturn plant, which is supposed to build small cars in new, less-costly ways.
But state officials in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, Tennessee and New York said in interviews over the past few days that the competition has included contacts in Japan and the United States between their officials and Toyota and Mitsubishi executives.
A spokesman for Illinois’ Department of Commerce and Community Affairs said the state has taken options on four potential sites for Mitsubishi totaling 1,800 acres to forestall speculation on them.
Vincent Tese, New York’s economic development director and chairman of the Urban Development Corp., met earlier this month in Japan with Kaneyoshi Kusunoki, an executive vice president at Toyota involved in the selecting the site.
Tese presented Kusunoki with three possible New York plant sites: one in Newburgh, another in Sheridan, near Buffalo (both of which also were offered to GM for Saturn) and a third at Ogdensburg near the Canadian border. Each, he said, totals about 1,000 acres.
