Toyota Motor Corp. and one of its top suppliers will invest a combined $791 million (¥85.59 billion) in Texas to build next-generation pickups as part of a drive to boost output in the U.S. and ease trade tensions with the Trump administration.
The announcement Toyota is plugging $391 million into its San Antonio truck factory comes six months after the automaker pledged to shell out an additional $3 billion on its U.S. operations by 2021, a move seen as an effort to head off threatened U.S. tariffs on vehicles imported from Japan. That was on top of an earlier $10 billion pledge Toyota made shortly before U.S. President Donald Trump took office.
"We view it as a tremendous vote of confidence in Texas and San Antonio and the truck market" in the U.S., Christopher Reynolds, the chief administrative officer and head of manufacturing for Toyota in North America, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.