Toyota Motor Manufacturing de Guanajuato

Toyota Motor Manufacturing de Guanajuato (TMMGT) is a Toyota automobile manufacturing facility located in Apaseo el Grande, Guanajuato, Mexico that opened in December 2019. The facility currently produces the Toyota Tacoma for the North American market. The plant has the capacity to produce 100,000 vehicles per year and employs 1,764 people.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing de Guanajuato
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryAutomotive
Founded16 December 2019; 4 years ago (2019-12-16)
Headquarters
Apaseo el Grande, Guanajuato
,
Mexico
Key people
Mike Bafan (president)
ProductsToyota Tacoma
Number of employees
1,764 (2020)
ParentToyota Motor North America

History edit

Toyota announced a plan in April 2015 to open a new factory in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.[1] The Guanajuato plant would be the automaker's second plant in Mexico, after Toyota Motor Manufacturing de Baja California (TMMBC), and its 15th in North America.[2] The plant will be the first to be built from the ground up to be able to take advantage of efficiencies enabled by the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), a company-wide effort to simplify the vehicles being produced by Toyota.[1] At the time, Toyota announced that the plant would produce the Corolla compact sedan.[1] Construction on the US$1 billion plant began with a groundbreaking in November 2016.[2]

The plant became the target of an international trade dispute in January 2017 when then US President-elect Donald Trump tweeted out anger towards Toyota for building a new plant in Mexico instead of the United States and threatened additional trade barriers, in the form of a border tax if the plant was built.[3][4] Toyota defended the plant and pointed out that the current TMMBC plant in Mexico supports production at the much larger Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas (TMMTX) plant in San Antonio which produced 230,000 vehicles per year and employed 3,300 US workers at the time.[5] The Trump administration never imposed additional tariffs on Toyota and the new United States–Mexico–Canada (USMCA) trade agreement that went into effect on 1 July 2020 allows for free trade of automobiles between the three countries as long as certain conditions are met.[6]

Toyota announced in August 2017 that it would shift the production of the plant from the Corolla, to the Tacoma pickup truck.[7]

The plant began production of the Tacoma on 19 December 2019 and the first truck rolled off the production line on 6 February 2020.[8] The plant has the capacity to produce 100,000 vehicles per year and employs 1,764 people.[8][9]

Between 2020 and 2021, Toyota wound down production of the Tacoma at its San Antonio plant as production increased in Guanajuato.[10]

Products made edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c Joseph, Noah (16 April 2015). "Toyota investing $1 billion in Mexico plant". Autoblog. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  2. ^ a b "Toyota Breaks Ground in Guanajuato" (Press release). 14 November 2016. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  3. ^ Donald J. Trump [@realDonaldTrump] (5 January 2017). "Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  4. ^ Clairmont, Nicholas (7 January 2017). "Trump Is Turning American Companies Into Reality-Show Contestants". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  5. ^ "Toyota in the U.S." Toyota USA Newsroom (Press release). 5 January 2017. Retrieved 4 September 2020.5 January 2017
  6. ^ Williams, Marcus (6 February 2020). "Toyota begins exports of Tacoma from Guanajuato". Automotive Logistics. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  7. ^ "Toyota will manufacture the Tacoma pick-up truck in its Guanajuato plant". San Miguel Times. 8 August 2017. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  8. ^ a b Juárez, Pilar; Ramos, Mariana (6 February 2020). "Toyota inaugura en Guanajuato su segunda planta en México". Milenio (in Mexican Spanish). Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  9. ^ "2020 Toyota Operations North America Fact Sheet" (PDF) (Press release). December 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2022.
  10. ^ "Toyota to Shift Tacoma Production to Mexico". MEXICONOW. 8 May 2020. Retrieved 4 September 2020.