Toyota said it plans to build a $75 million plant in Ontario, Calif., that will be the company's largest parts procurement and distribution facility in the United States.
Company executives said the project is a "major step in the Americanization of Toyota" and will ease the lag time for American dealers to get parts from Japan.The Ontario warehouse is expected to have a $74.7 million inventory consisting of 191,400 kinds of parts that will be sent to North American distributors, Toyota's 1,400 dealers, U.S. auto plants and parts centers in Japan and Europe. Executives said it should generate about 350 new jobs for Southern California workers.
Toyota's parts procurement and distribution is currently handled by five Japanese plants in Tobashima, Inazawa, Kamigo, Oguchi and Haruji. Some of those workers will be reassigned to other jobs when the Ontario center opens in 1996, while others will continue processing parts for Japanese plants and dealers, Toyota spokeswoman Nancy Hubbell said.
The 94-acre site, near the heavily traveled I-15 freeway and about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, will house a 760,000 square-foot building and may eventually be part of a larger complex, said Bob Bennett, a Toyota Motor Sales vice president and general manager of the company's North American Parts Logistic Division.
The new plant will be part of an effort to expand Toyota's operations in the United States, Bennett said.
As recently as 1985, every Toyota car and truck sold in the United States was imported from Japan. Forty-six percent of the Toyotas sold in the United States last year were built at North American plants, and that number is expected to climb to 60 percent in the mid-1990s.
Toyota has since built manufacturing plants in Canada and Kentucky and a joint manufacturing plant with General Motors in Fremont, Calif.
"Back in 1957, Toyota's only business was importing and distributing small cars built in Japan," Bennett said. "Today, we have over $5 billion invested in U.S. operations."
Toyota, which manufactures one of the most popular imports in the United States, employed a U.S. workforce of more than 16,000, with a payroll exceeding $700 million last year. Another 72,000 work in Toyota and Lexus deal-er-ships.
A large share of the company's operations are based in California, with Toyota and its dealers responsible for nearly 19,000 California jobs with an $865 million payroll.