Auto Maker’s 1st American Facility to Be Built in Kentucky : U.S. Toyota Plant to Employ 2,000

Toyota’s first U.S. auto assembly plant in Georgetown, Ky., will employ 2,000 workers producing 200,000 cars a year beginning in 1988, while another 2,500 jobs will be created at outside supplier firms, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday.

Toyota is expected to announce its plans for the plant at a press conference in Lexington today, but McConnell released the details about the project following a dinner meeting with Toyota officials in Washington. Other Kentucky officials, including Gov. Martha Layne Collins, have also confirmed that Toyota will locate its plant on a farmland site outside Georgetown, about 13 miles from Lexington in central Kentucky.

The $500-million plant will begin assembling a version of the compact Toyota Camry model in time for the start of the 1989 model year in the fall of 1988, a spokeswoman for McConnell said. But she said McConnell hadn’t been told by Toyota when construction would begin or whether Toyota plans to allow the United Auto Workers to represent its workers. Toyota officials refused to comment on their plans before today’s announcement.

Relatively Small Employer

While the project is important to Kentucky, its work force of 2,000 is relatively small--by domestic auto industry standards--for an assembly plant of the size that Toyota plans to build. A typical American assembly plant, producing about 250,000 cars a year, employs between 4,000 and 6,000 workers on two shifts, even with the recent introduction of automation technology throughout the domestic industry.

Toyota is the last major Japanese auto maker to decide to build an assembly plant in the United States. Honda has been building cars in Ohio since 1982, while Nissan began passenger car production in Tennessee earlier this year. Mazda is building an assembly plant outside Detroit that will open in 1987, and Mitsubishi has agreed to form a joint venture with Chrysler to build cars in Illinois starting in 1988.

Toyota’s joint venture with General Motors in Fremont, Calif., has been producing subcompact cars since late last year, but, so far, all of the plant’s output has been earmarked for GM’s Chevrolet division. Beginning next year, however, Toyota will receive 50,000 units out of the joint venture’s annual output of 240,000 to supplement its imports and the models that it will eventually produce in Kentucky.