Toyota’s Most Popular Midsize Pickup Will Soon Be Made In The USA







The Toyota Tacoma is a tremendously popular truck. Just last year, Toyota sold 274,638 units of the midsize truck. Currently, the truck is produced at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Baja California plant in Mexico. However, by 2030, Toyota announced that it plans on moving the truck’s production to Texas as part of a $3.6 billion and 2.5 million square foot expansion to its San Antonio truck manufacturing plant, where the brand already makes the Tundra and Sequoia. Toyota did not announce what’s going to happen to the outgoing Baja plant once Tacoma production moves to Texas.

Despite being a Japanese company, Toyota produces a great many of its vehicles in North America and Central America. It has facilities in Texas, California, West Virginia, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Indiana, and Tennessee. Just the Georgetown, Kentucky plant is responsible for perennial favorites like the Camry and RAV4, numbering 444,414 vehicle made last year, according to Toyota.

Smoothing out production

Putting the obvious political motivations for moving Tacoma production to North America aside (Toyota’s press release included quotes from judges, the governor, senators, and congresspeople), the current generation of Tacoma is a pretty big evolution from previous year’s models. For one, it rides on the hybrid-ready TNGA-F platform, the truck and SUV version of the global TNGA platform that underpins just about every new Toyota.

It’s not a coincidence that Toyota is moving the Tacoma to a plant that makes other vehicles that ride on the same platform, in this case the Tundra and Sequoia. Funnily enough, the Lexus LX, a vehicle that shares a lot of mechanical components with the Sequoia, is made in Japan.

Either way you interpret Toyota’s exact motivations for moving the plant to North America, this will likely streamline production of some of Toyota’s most popular models. And as competition in the midsize truck market heats up with pressure from Ford, General Motors, Nissan, and quite possibly Ram, smoothing out production could be a boon for the company to sell more trucks.





Source link

Leave a Reply

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Get our latest articles delivered straight to your inbox. No spam, we promise.

Recent Reviews


NotebookLM is one of the most interesting AI tools out there, with little competition to speak of. While it can be used by anyone, Google’s put a large focus on tools students can take advantage of, and it may receive a new feature to make it even more powerful for those looking to learn. 

The Gemini-powered AI research assistant tool is different because it only uses the sources you provide it with as its data. Compare this to something like the standard Gemini AI chatbot, which will scour the entire internet to find an answer to your question — and the internet is full of conflicting information. If your sources don’t have the answer, NotebookLM won’t attempt to make one up for you. 

AI Atlas

According to a Threads post from AI-focused tech site Testing Catalog on Wednesday, NotebookLM may get a new source that you can add: Textbooks. If and when it arrives, this could open up an entire world of ways students can use the tool as a study buddy. 

Textbooks will join a growing number of source options for NotebookLM. You can already add files, websites, audio clips, Google Play Books and more. Now, adding in an academic textbook for a test you need to cram for? That sounds like a win for all students. 

Testing Catalog shared a screenshot that shows textbooks as an option to be a source, but little else is known about what it truly entails. Given that you could essentially scan the pages of any book and add them as a source, it seems that there may be some sort of partnership in play here. 

Last year, Google partnered with OpenStax, a provider of free, peer-reviewed textbooks, when it introduced Public Notebooks. Whether the new source option is limited to OpenStax textbooks or if there’s another partnership in the works remains to be seen. 

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 





Source link