Toyota plans to upgrade U.S. plant venture with GM

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Friday, July 15, 2005 | 10:10 a.m.

Toyota Motor Corp., the world's second-largest automaker, will upgrade a California factory that it shares with General Motors Corp. to make "better vehicles," Toyota's president said.

The plant needs to be improved, Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota's president, said in an interview Thursday, without saying how much would be spent. The two companies created New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., known as Nummi, in Fremont, Calif., in 1984 as a 50-50 joint venture.

Toyota is expanding North American capacity to sustain growth in the United States, its most profitable market. It will open a pickup truck factory in San Antonio next year and an assembly plant in Canada in 2008. The company may be preparing to make hybrid gasoline-electric Corolla cars at the California factory, said Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Koji Endo.

"It makes total sense for Toyota to install hybrids on the Corolla, which is one of its best-selling models, and assemble it in California, where most of the hybrid buyers are," Endo said.