GREG KEENAN

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

January 29, 2008 at 9:04 PM EST

The start of production at the new Toyota Motor Corp. assembly plant in Woodstock, Ont., will be delayed several weeks as the auto maker tries to make sure the vehicles it produces meet high quality standards.

“We're very optimistic that we're going to have a good ramp up but I'm going to go slow,” Ray Tanguay, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., said in an interview. “Quality first before anything.”

The new plant was originally scheduled to begin cranking out RAV4 crossover utility vehicles in September. Production will still begin this fall, Mr. Tanguay said, but the Canadian manufacturing division of Toyota wants improvements to environmentally friendly painting technology that has been used in the existing RAV4 plant in Japan.

Toyota is still optimistic about the state of the North American market and the prospects for the 150,000 vehicles that will come out of the $1.1-billion plant, he said.

Nonetheless, other Toyota officials have scaled back their expectations of the company's sales in the U.S. market to growth of about 1 per cent this year from earlier predictions of 3 per cent or more.

Toyota, which is vying with General Motors Corp. for the title of the world's largest auto maker, has mounted a renewed focus on quality after a record number of recalls in the U.S. market in 2005, when the company was required to fix defects on 2.3 million vehicles.

Last year, Consumer Reports magazine ended a practice of automatically recommending Toyota vehicles to its readers even before drivers submitted data on the vehicles.

“Quality is the essential aspect of Toyota as a car maker,” Katsuaki Watanabe, chief executive officer of Toyota Motor, told reporters in Detroit earlier this month at the North American International Auto Show.

The company has gone back to the basics to address the quality issues, Mr. Watanabe said.

The focus on quality has also caused the company to slow down its aggressive growth in North America.

Until recently, Toyota was on pace for a new plant almost annually. It opened a pickup truck factory in Texas in 2006, began producing Camry mid-sized cars at a plant it shares with Subaru in Indiana last year and will start Woodstock production this year.

A plant in Mississippi is scheduled to begin producing Highlander sport utility vehicles in 2010.