Toyota Motor Corp. will shift production of more than one-third of its Lexus RX sport utility vehicles to a plant in Ontario, Canada, from its Kyushu plant in Miyawaka, Fukuoka Prefecture, the automaker announced July 24.
The automaker said producing the RX closer to its main SUV market in North America will mitigate the impact of the strong yen.
Toyota currently manufactures the RX at its Toyota Motor Kyushu Inc.'s Miyata plant and at the Canadian plant, where production began in 2003.
Toyota plans to expand the annual production capacity of its Canadian plant by 30,000 units by early 2014. The Kyushu plant, which currently manufactures about 80,000 units annually, will see its output cut by 30,000 units.
Also on July 24, Toyota announced production of its 200-millionth vehicle worldwide as of June this year, 76 years and 11 months after Toyoda Automatic Loom Works Ltd. (now Toyota Industries Corp.), the automaker's predecessor, manufactured its Model G1 truck, its first automotive product, in August 1935.
It took Toyota 36 years and six months to top the 10-million-unit mark, and 61 years and six months to reach 100 million units in January 1997.
Toyota picked up the pace with the expansion of overseas production, and it took the automaker only slightly more than 15 years to build its next 100 million vehicles.
Toyota manufactured 145.21 million units in Japan and 55.12 million units overseas by the end of June.
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