Hybrid vehicles continue to be at the forefront of Toyota’s green car plans after it announced a manufacturing system for midsize hybrids.
According to a report in the Nikkei, start-to-finish manufacturing will now take place at a Kyushu subsidiary. Toyota Motor Kyushu Inc is an integrated producer of many Lexus models and other large vehicles but at the moment the engines for the SAI and HS250h hybrid models are shipped from its parent’s Kamigo plant.
Now however, Toyota will invest around one billion yen into retooling the idle assembly line at the Kanda plant and by the middle of 2012 it hopes to have overhauled the line so that it can take over on the assembly of 2.4 and 1.8litre engines for hybrid cars.
Capacity for the new line is expected to reach around 150,000 engines a year with Toyota also planning an integrated production model for hybrids at a factory in the Tohoku region late next year.
