The top three Japanese automakers - Toyota, Nissan and Honda - wanted to increase local production in North America by a combined 30 percent by 2010, a news report said Sunday.
The three automakers' combined capacity was projected to rise from the present 4.3 million units to more than 5.4 million by 2010, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
Toyota Motor would build its eighth factory in the region at a cost of several tens of billions of yen (up to 765 million dollars), the Nihon Keizai said.
The biggest Japanese carmaker had picked some candidate sites close to Kentucky and Indiana, where it already operated plants, the newspaper said.
Toyota, which was set to become the biggest carmaker in the world, was expected to produce 100,000 to 150,000 Highlander sport utility vehicles a year at the new factory, it said.
The launch of the eighth facility would boost its capacity to roughly 2.2 million units in 2009, from the current 1.6 million, the report said.
Meanwhile, Nissan Motor, which now had an annual capacity of 1.3 million units, was considering boosting the level to more than 1.6 million units by around fiscal 2008, the newspaper said.
Honda would build a new factory with an annual capacity of 200,000 vehicles in Indiana in 2008, boosting its capacity in North America to 1.6 million units from the current 1.4 million, the report also said.
Japanese automakers already control more than 30 percent of the US auto market.
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