Toyota to shutter Long Beach assembly line

Long Beach, Southern California's first city to have a major auto manufacturing plant, will now be the last.

Japanese automaker Toyota said it will close its North Long Beach assembly line by July, ending 88 years of automobile production in Southern California.

Citing a drop in consumer demand caused by rising fuel prices and the recent credit crunch, Toyota officials said that Long Beach production of the Hino commercial vehicle would be shifted to a Toyota facility in Williamstown, W.Va.

The assembly line, which produced 4,800 Hino trucks last year, is located at Toyota's TABC, or Toyota Auto Body California, facility in Long Beach. The rest of the TABC facility, which manufactures parts such as truck beds and catalytic converters for various Toyota models, will remain open.

TABC opened in 1972 as Toyota's first North American manufacturing facility and the Hino assembly line was added to the plant in 2004 with a goal of producing 10,000 trucks a year by 2006. The facility never reached the projections though, and less than 5,000 completed vehicles rolled off the line last year. North American sales for the vehicle, including production from the Long Beach line and plants in West Virginia and Canada, fell from a total of 8,200 in 2006 to about 6,600 last year.

Hino, a majority-owned subsidiary of Toyota, is reportedly offering buyout packages for as many as 100 employees affected by the closure. However, Toyota did not specify how many of the 700 employees at the entire TABC site would be displaced by the shuttering of the Hino line. 

Source: American Shipper