Mazda Toyota Manufacturing Gets Additional $830M Investment
Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, the new joint venture between Mazda and Toyota, yesterday announced it would invest an additional $830 million to bolster training and manufacturing technologies at its new Alabama-based facility.
The two automakers have now invested $2.311 billion in Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, just over 44 percent more than the $1.6 billion it had announced in 2018. “The investment reaffirms Mazda and Toyota’s commitment to produce the highest-quality products at the facility,” the automakers said in a joint statement.
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MTM, located in Huntsville, Alabama, is planned to have the capacity to annually produce up to 300,000 units of a new, jointly-developed Mazda and Toyota SUV that has yet to be revealed. At the moment, the plant is still under construction, with over three-quarters of the core structure, ductwork, and electrical elements now complete.
The production of these 300,000 SUVs will come with the creation of up to 4,000 new jobs, with 600 employees hired so far. Mazda and Toyota plan “to resume accepting applications for production positions later in 2020.” They didn’t say why the application process was suspended, but we assume it has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
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In fact, the pandemic may be related to the extra $830 million the automakers are investing in MTM, which could have prompted the need for “enhanced training” pertaining to cleaning procedures and respecting proper social distancing guidelines, such as we’ve seen at other Toyota facilities.
That being said, MTM also says the investment is being made to “incorporate more cutting-edge manufacturing technologies” for improving quality and reliability. It’s hard to know exactly what that means, especially as there are still no details about the new SUV the automakers are planning to make, but given that both Mazda and Toyota are currently leaders in the industry for automotive quality reliability, we can only imagine how much better they can get.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.