TOYOTA AUSTRALIA TO BUILD 10,000 CAMRY HYBRIDS/YEAR
06.11.08 - Leído 30 veces. Enviar esta notaNobuhiro Kubo
Toyota Motor Corp will start assembling its Camry hybrid cars in Australia in early 2010 and aim to produce 10,000 of them a year, the world’s biggest automaker said on Tuesday, in its latest effort to popularise such fuel-efficient vehicles
NAGOYA, Japan; June 11, 2008.- That would make Australia the fourth country to build gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, now mainly sold by Toyota, Honda Motor Co and Ford Motor Co.
“We decided to build the Camry hybrid in Australia because Australians are keenly aware of environmental issues including global warming,” Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe told a news conference in Nagoya, central Japan, attended by visiting Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Rudd, whose government has allocated A$500 million (US$475 million) towards the Green Car Innovation Fund to encourage development of low-emissions vehicles, said Toyota would get A$35 million in grants for Camry hybrid production.
Australia had been looking to host production of hybrid cars for about a year to ease the pressure of rising fuel costs and global warming, he said.
Toyota will assemble the car with imported hybrid modules at its 150,000 vehicles-a-year Altona factory in the suburbs of Melbourne. The plant, which builds the Camry sedan and the Aurion sister model, produced 149,000 vehicles last year, two-thirds of which were exported to the Middle East.
With fuel prices hitting record highs around the world, automakers are racing to offer fuel-efficient alternatives such as pure electric and ethanol-fuelled cars. To reach its target of selling 1 million hybrid cars a year in the early part of the next decade, Toyota will need to more than double production of the vehicles.
Toyota now builds the Camry hybrid in Japan and in the US state of Kentucky. It also assembles a small number of Prius hybrid cars — just 320 in 2007 — at a joint venture factory in China.
Toyota increased sales in Australia by 11 percent to 245,000 vehicles in 2007. Of that, it sold 4,200 hybrids, up 75 percent from 2006.
Earlier this year, Australia lost one of its few auto factories after Mitsubishi Motors Corp closed its loss-making Adelaide plant. A Toyota executive had recently bemoaned the strong Australian dollar, which makes its locally produced Camry uncompetitive when exported.
Tariffs on imported vehicles in Australia are also due to be halved in 2010 to 5 percent, giving automakers less incentive to build locally. General Motors Corp and Ford also have factories in Australia.
Toyota’s shares reacted little to the news, falling 0.6 percent to 5,400 yen in early afternoon trade, in line with the broader market. (US$1=1.053 Australian dollar)
(Reuters)
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