West New York (United States) (AFP)
Toyota announced Friday the transfer of production of the Tacoma pickup from the United States to Mexico, but assured that no American jobs would be affected by this relocation.
This announcement comes the day after the approval by the US Congress of the new free trade agreement associating the United States, Canada and Mexico (AEUMC).
The Toyota Tacoma pickup has been assembled since 2010 at a group site in San Antonio (Texas, south), which employs 3,200 people and has a production capacity of 208,000 units per year.
But this production will stop at the end of 2021, the automaker said in a statement. All production of this model will then take place in its Mexican factory in Baja.
The San Antonio plant will be assigned from 2022 to the production of another model, the urban SUV Sequoia, which was previously manufactured in the center of the country, in Princeton, Indiana.
It is not excluded that this decision of the Japanese group angered President Donald Trump, who had already torpedoed in 2017, via a furious tweet, his project to transfer the production of the Corolla model from the United States to Mexico.
"Toyota has announced that it will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico to produce Corolla cars sold in the United States." NEVER! Build your factories in the United States or pay heavy customs taxes, "urged the White House tenant.
Toyota changed its mind and finally entrusted the production of the Corollas to its Mississippi site (south).
The automaker explained on Friday that the relocation of production of the Tacoma pickup truck sold to the United States was part of a restructuring plan still aiming to invest 13 billion dollars on American soil by 2021. It has already invested 7 , 1 billion including 1.6 billion in a joint factory in Alabama (south) with Mazda.
© 2020 AFP