Toyota Cut Tundra Production by 29%
The Financial Times reports that Toyota sliced production of its full-sized pickup by 29 percent last month, trimming November's output to 18,300 vehicles. Quite how that recently revealed factoid reconciles with last week's statement by ToMoCo's U.S. group vice president and general manager that the automaker had a good shot at meeting its 200k per year Tundra sales target is anyone's guess. I'm thinking Bob Carter's boast was a triumph of hype-fueled expectation over hard reality. And the hard reality is that the U.S. pickup truck market has tanked. Automotive News (AN, sub) reports that flatbed sales fell fat by 10.4 percent last month. To try to maintain the big Mo on the Texas-built Tundra, Toyota is hawking zero-percent financing or $2k cash rebates on the '08 model. In any case, as a non-union operator, winding down production doesn't put a major ding in Toyota's operating expenses. And there's LOADS of profit in the vehicles they do sell.
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0% for 60 months, or $3k on the 2007's here (Mid-Atlantic). GM and Ford have similar discounts.
mikey, It takes time to win market share. That's all. Toyota is perfectly willing to win customers slowly.
In the long run they will win though. Everytime the market dips and they can continue to make money while the domestics have to keep paying union labor, we get closer to the day that Toyota wins. I can't believe there aren't more manufacturing plants in southern Texas. The Dallas area has gotten almost as unionized as Detroit.