Toyota To Restart Mississippi Plant Next Fall… But Will There Be Demand?

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

If there’s a face of Toyota’s overinvestment in the United States market, it’s the company’s Blue Springs, Mississippi assembly plant. Construction on the billion-dollar plant was begun in 2007, but was halted in 2008, when plummeting demand for new automobiles forced Toyota to cut back on is US manufacturing capacity. For the past two years, Toyota’s 170 workers at the Mississippi plant have been doing their best to stay busy, but the Wall Street Journal reports that hiring has now been restarted and the plant will begin producing Corollas next fall. But will demand be high enough for Toyota to justify its eighth production plant in the US? Not everyone seems to think so…



After all, Toyota’s North American capacity utilization rate was a paltry 60 percent last year, although the firm does expect utilization to reach 90 percent by the end of this year. Still, with the overall market growing slowly, plant experts wonder if the Blue Springs plant actually makes sense.

So far, Toyota has limited the plant’s expected output to a relatively modest 140,000 vehicles a year, even though its capacity is closer to 200,000. Industry experts say most vehicle assembly factories in North America need to make more than 200,000 units per year to be profitable.

“If you spend that kind of money, then at a 140,000 [units] a year, it’s tough to make money,” said Ron Harbour, an automotive consultant and Detroit-based partner at Oliver Wyman. “Toyota may be guessing that higher fuel economy standards will create more demand for small cars.”

But Mississippi workers have some unusual allies in their bid for assembly work: General Motors and the Japanese Yen. When GM pulled out of its NUMMI joint venture with Toyota, Toyota relocated that plant’s Corolla production to Japan. Now, however, a rising Yen is driving Japanese auto production out of the island nation, and into places like Mississippi.

Still, there’s many a slip twixt the plans and the production, a fact well-proven by the history of Toyota’s eighth US production site. Blue Springs was originally meant to produce the Highlander, which seemed likely to be a top-seller for Toyota before the gas chocks of 2008. Then, Toyota moved to locate Prius production to Blue Springs, as sales of the hybrid soared as gas hit record high prices. Now that gas prices have come down but economic recovery remains sluggish, the less-expensive Corolla is the new vehicle of choice for production at Blue Springs. Still, plenty can change in terms of both gas prices and overall economic optimism by next fall, so there’s no guaranteeing that Blue Springs will be producing Corollas at capacity, let alone that Toyota won’t be wishing it hadn’t decided to locate a different vehicle there.

Still, for a region that has lost some 15,000 jobs since 1990 and for a state government that invested some $300m in incentives for the plant, Toyota’s announcement that the Blue Springs plant is once again hiring can only come as a welcome news.

Edward Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer

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  • Steven02 Steven02 on Dec 28, 2010

    Close NUMMI reopen a plant without the UAW. This is the sole reason they wanted out of NUMMI.

  • Sgt Beavis Sgt Beavis on Dec 29, 2010

    A nice shiny new plant in the heart of "anti union" USA. Those folks at NUMMI should pay close attention to this because it's the real reason they no longer have a job.

  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
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