TOYOTA ROAD USA

• Share

(2 of 4)

For starters, Toyota is adding a new line of minivans to its $3.4 billion plant in Georgetown, where Camrys and Avalons are now produced, and tripling the output of its St. Louis-based Bodine Aluminum subsidiary, which makes engine components. Next will come a new $400 million engine plant in Buffalo, West Virginia, and the T100 pickup plant in Princeton. Toyota is expanding other facilities, like its Corolla factory in Cambridge, Ontario. There's a $310 million technical center abuilding in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Toyota recently opened the world's largest proving ground, a 12,000-acre property outside Phoenix, Arizona. "We can now do everything the Big Three do," says Yale Gieszl, Toyota's American-born executive vice president for U.S. sales and marketing. "The flag of the parent company is really irrelevant."

The swift U.S. buildup by Toyota and rivals like Honda has revitalized whole communities. A University of Kentucky study credits Toyota's Georgetown presence with creating 22,000 jobs in the state (the plant itself employs 6,500) and adding $1.5 billion to the state's economy during its eight years in operation. Soaring property-tax rolls have enabled Georgetown to build new police and fire stations and community-care facilities. In Princeton property values are taking off.

Hopes for similar surges, along with jobs and rising income, drew throngs of townspeople and the high school band in Buffalo two weeks ago to groundbreaking ceremonies for Toyota's West Virginia engine plant. Local schoolchildren sang a haiku ("Cherry Blossoms born of spring, let's go see, let's go see") as dignitaries planted 10 Japanese maples to symbolize Toyota's new U.S. roots. For Senator Jay Rockefeller, landing Toyota marked the capstone of a 20-year crusade to boost the economy of one of the country's poorest states. Thanks to Toyota, Rockefeller says, Buffalo (pop. 969) is "going to become a player in the global marketplace."

However long that takes, Toyota has already created a corn-fed hybrid of East and West along the I-64 corridor. About half of Toyota's top 100 executives in the U.S. are American. And there are about 50 Japanese in the 6,500 person work force at the Georgetown plant. At the Tachibana sushi bar in nearby Lexington, Kentucky, manager Takashi Iwata serves raw fish to Japanese diners as well as to locals raised on burgers and barbecued ribs. "I am happiest when I have customers in cowboy shirts using chopsticks," Iwata says. "But to tell you the truth, my ancestors would be shocked."

So would the forebears of Bob Lloyd, the Missourian who runs Bodine Aluminum in St. Louis and nearby Troy. Here Japanese workers hold Shinto ceremonies to celebrate milestones such as a new furnace or the casting of the 1 millionth engine part. "Our people think the plant ceremonies are a riot," says Lloyd.