Toyota to Build Truck Plant : Autos: The factory will be in North America, but the company would not be more specific.

Toyota Motor Corp. formally announced Monday that it will build a plant in North America to manufacture pickup trucks.

The company refused to say where the plant might be. A report last month in the newspaper Chunichi Shimbun, based in Toyota’s hometown of Nagoya, suggested that Evansville, Ind., was a leading candidate.

The plant is to produce 100,000 trucks a year and open in late 1998 or early 1999, Toyota said.

Toyota had unofficially disclosed plans for the plant in June as part of an effort by Japanese auto makers to stave off U.S. sanctions on Japanese-made luxury cars. The effort was successful when Washington and Tokyo settled their auto trade dispute June 28.

Japanese auto makers have been moving production overseas to avoid high costs at home and soothe the frictions that have resulted from Japan’s huge trade surpluses with other countries.

More than half of Japan’s $66-billion trade surplus with the United States in 1994 was in autos and auto parts, although economists note that the figures are relatively small when compared with the overall sizes of the nations’ economies.

Toyota already has two plants in North America, at Georgetown, Ky., and Cambridge, Canada. It also runs a joint-venture plant in Fremont, Calif., with General Motors Corp.

Toyota also said Monday that it would consolidate several support functions in the United States into a single base. It did not say where that would be, although officials in Cincinnati have said their city is under consideration.