Toyota working on India car

Toyota, which has a 74:26 joint venture with India’s Kirloskar group, intends to roll out the first car from the Bangalore manufacturing site by December 1999, Yokoi said.

“In the first year, production will be pegged at 20,000 units. Within a few years the factory would work to its full 50,000 units a year capacity. Once we reach that capacity we would introduce a new model slightly smaller than the first family-type car of eight to ten seats,” senior Toyota director, Hideaki Otaka, said.

Otaka said the factory will be expanded to annually produce an additional 1.5 lakh cars of a new model.“But the family car of the initial model will continue in tandem with the new model so that in the next few years Toyota-Kirloskar will produce 2 lakh cars a year,” he said. Yokoi said the car would be built in co-operation with Indian engineers.

Toyota would be investing about $170 million in the joint venture company, which has acquired 440 acres of land near Bangalore from the Karnataka government. The company officials declined to divulge details of either the name or the price of the car.

“It will be price competitive,” they said. Otaka said 15 Indian engineers would soon come to the Nagoya production facilities of Toyota, followed by a 100 others.

“Toyota’s idea is to make the car India-oriented in every way,” he said. He said the company was very particular about the vendors and hence would encourage local component manufacturers to work in close co-operation with the company.

This is the second time Toyota is participating in a business venture in the country.

On an earlier ocassion,it had teamed up with the Delhi-based DCM group to produce DCM-Toyota light commercial vehicles (LCVs), which were discontinued when Korea’s Daewoo Motors started a joint venture with the company. The Toyota-Kirloskar joint venture company’s board has 11 directors, with eight from Toyota and three from Kirloskar.