Toyota Motors announced Monday plans to invest $1.33 billion into the Georgetown, Kentucky, plant where the automaker produces the Toyota Camry.
No new jobs are being added, but the upgrades to the Kentucky plant represent the largest single investment at a single factory inside the United States, according to Yahoo Finance. The money will be used to upgrade assembly technology at the Kentucky plant — the largest Toyota factory in the world.
“This is more about job retention and setting up for the future,” Rick Hesterberg, a Toyota spokesman, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We’ve got 8,200 people working here and we build over half a million vehicles. We’re a thirty year old plant, and we needed the upgrades. The new technology will allow us to be much more flexible to adapt to market forces in the future.”
The plant recently added an additional 700 workers to build the new 2018 Camry. The new upgrades will allow the plant to diversify its production portfolio, while still building the Camry model, which has been the best selling sedan in the United States since 2001.
“This is the largest investment in our plant’s history and it speaks directly to the quality of our people and our products, as well as the partnerships we’ve forged in the local community and across the state,” Wil James, president of Toyota Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc, said in a press release.
President Donald Trump, who criticized Toyota shortly before taking office in January for plans to build a plant in Mexico, took note of Toyota’s investment Monday, asserting that the decision to invest in Kentucky was a sign that the economic climate has already improved under his administration.
“Toyota’s decision to invest $1.3 billion in their Kentucky plant is further evidence that manufacturers are now confident that the economic climate has greatly improved under my administration and echoes the recent National Association of Manufacturers’ 2017 Outlook Survey showing that 93% of manufacturers are now optimistic, which is an increase of 37% from just a few months ago,” Trump said in a statement that was included in the press release.
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