Toyota to Add Assembly Site in Southland

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Co. said Thursday that it will establish Southern California’s first new vehicle assembly plant in half a century at the site of its pickup truck-bed manufacturing plant in Long Beach.

The facility will begin assembling medium-duty commercial panel trucks for Toyota subsidiary Hino Motors in 2004, when the truck-bed manufacturing operation is moved to a new Toyota plant being built just outside Tijuana.

Bringing the Hino operation to Long Beach will preserve about 550 jobs and an annual payroll of $38.5 million, Toyota said.

“This is Hino’s first North American operation and it marks the reemergence of vehicle production in Southern California,” said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president of Indiana-based Toyota Motor Manufacturing, the Toyota Motor Corp. unit that operates the Long Beach facility.

Revamping the plant for vehicle production is expected to represent an investment of several hundred million dollars for Toyota.

Although a number of specialty companies build cars in Southern California, auto production by major car makers stopped in 1992 with the closure of General Motors Corp.’s assembly plant in Van Nuys.

Toyota will assemble 4,000 Hino trucks a year in Long Beach, Cuneo said, which is twice as many as the company currently sells in the U.S.

Cuneo would not say whether the truck company plans to expand U.S. sales or to export some of the production from the Long Beach facility.

Hino competes in a Japanese truck market that has seen little growth in recent years.

It is moving the truck-bed production to Baja California as part of a previously announced plan to establish a major production facility there, its first in Mexico. But the Long Beach plant, Cuneo said, remains “very much a part of our long term future.”