Toyota Motor Corp. said it will build a $400 million engine plant in West Virginia that will employ up to 300 people.
The announcement came on the day the company’s president was quoted as saying Japanese-made Toyotas are superior to those produced in the United States.
The plant, to be built on a 230-acre site in Buffalo, W.Va., about 30 miles northwest of Charleston, will be able to produce 300,000 engines a year when it goes into operation in late 1998, Toyota President Hiroshi Okuda said.
The plant will supply engines for Corollas starting in late 1998. It will allow Japan’s largest automaker to put North American-made engines in all its North American-made Corollas.
Toyota also has an engine plant in Georgetown, Ky., that produces 500,000 engines a year, and a plant in Ontario that makes 50,000 a year.
But at a groundbreaking Wednesday for a $700 million Toyota pickup truck plant in Indiana, Okuda told USA Today the U.S. versions of his company’s cars are inferior to those made in Japan.
“In many respects our U.S. operations are catching up,” he said.
