glamglam

What does everyone think? How much will this move by Toyota affect Lexus ES350 production in the USA Kentucky plant?

Toyota slashes April production, takes 'intentional pause' from rampant growth | Automotive News (autonews.com)

Global production will be cut 20% in April, 10% in May and 5% in June.
THIS IS NOT OLD NEWS BY THE WAY. TOYOTA ANNOUNCED THAT THEY WERE GOING TO DO THIS LAST WEEK.

Toyota plans 17% cut in global production in April | Reuters

LexFinally

In my opinion, it will make the shortage of new ES vehicles meaningfully worse.

Taking Toyota's announcement at face value, this was done in response to worsening burnout and the inability to keep producing at the current level for both component and human reasons. Those factors aren't going away soon, and the comment about retreating to less frequent re-evaluations of the situation confirms it.

The end of the story, where they explicitly leave room to cut back production even more, confirms it further. The reference to Covid is an acknowledgment of the reality that the new Omicron 2 variant is gutting Hong Kong and spilling out to China, where a terrified government is literally building a hospital in six days. It seems inevitable that this will ultimately impact the Southeast Asian countries that are a vital part of Toyota's supply chain, if not Japan itself.

Finally, if all that isn't enough, the story specifically mentions the ES as a model whose production will be cut.

Unfortunately, I think the overall picture painted here is pretty clear.

ATL350

Granted that’s a global cut but there’s no way we won’t be affected here. Upsetting for me, though, as I have a new UL “in the pipeline”, with a planned build date by the end of this month. Hopefully I’ll still get it as planned. Fingers crossed!!

LS500Fan

I was initially supposed to get my new ES300h UL about now, last I heard was end of April estimate. I anticipate the next time I ask it will be end of May or later. Time will tell… 🤞

glamglam

The only thing good that I see about this 3-month production cut is that the production cuts are on a sliding scale and will go down from 20% in April to 10% in May and to 5% in June. The production cuts will lessen as time goes on. There will be an average of 750,000 vehicles produced worldwide in the month of April (250,000 in Japan and 500,000 overseas in the rest of the world) with the 20% production cuts. After April, during the months of May and June the average production output will be about 800,000 per month for these 3 months.

glamglam

I have a new ES350 UL that I have my name on too, but mine is going to be an allocation. I'm currently dealing with one of the largest Lexus dealers in my area that does a lot of volume that sells a lot of ES350's and other Lexus models, so I'm hoping that they will be able to get a UL on one of their allocations. They get allocations twice a month. Once during the middle of the month and then again during the end of the month. They will attempt to get a UL of my color combination and interior color with all the options that I requested by trying to "flip" one of their ES350 allocations and turn it into a UL if they can.

mattsrs

Similar news: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/t...ed-184032.html

glamglam

This below is even a much better source of what Toyota will be doing with their production. The article comes directly from Toyota source itself:

April to June Production Plan (as of March 17) | Corporate | Global Newsroom | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website

If you look and carefully read the Toyota link above, you will see that most of the production cuts for the months of April will be for 7 lines of cars in 5 plants in Japan. ALSO, if you look at the production cuts for the LEXUS ES and LEXUS RX vehicles, it shows that these 2 particular models will be cut from production in Japan for ONLY 1 day on Friday, April 1st. at the Kyushu Miyata plant There will be no other production cuts for the ES and for the RX vehicles in the month of April at the ES/RX Kyushu Miyata Plant. That's it. Both of these models will be cut from production for ONLY 1 day. The meaning that I get from carefully reading this Toyota article is that ES Myushi Miyata plant will reopen for production again on April 2nd.

I was thinking. This article talks about the suspension of production in the Japanese factories in Japan. It does not mention anything about suspension of production at plants here in the USA. Maybe this means that there is a good chance that the ES production at the Kentucky plant here in the USA might not be affected that much if the ES350 Kyushi Miyata plant in Japan only suspends production for the ES for only 1 day like they say they will on April 1st.

Maybe the Kentucky plant might not suspend ES350 production at all or maybe they might suspend production for only 1 day just like they plan on doing at the Japanese Kyushu Miyata plant. Whatever it may be, Toyota clearly shows in their article production suspension will occur only at their Japan manufacturing plants. They do not mention anything about production suspension occurring anywhere here at any of their USA plants. I could be wrong about this, but this maybe means that most of their production cuts will occur over in Japan at their ES/RX manufacturing plant (as well as at their other Japan only Toyota plants) and that not many production cuts will occur here in the USA at their ES Kentucky plant. I have a feeling that the ES production will not be affected that much over here at the ES Kentucky plant because of this. I could be wrong, but I have a gut feeling that this is what's going to occur. Then in May and in June, the production cuts will lessen even more in Japan and globally if Toyota follows their 10% production cut for May and their 5% production cut for June.

glamglam

Yes, similar news. Even this article mentions that these production cuts will occur only in Japan.

mattsrs

if the cause is chip shortage, I cannot see how US production can be immune from it

Dallas250

I think most of us reasonable minded people all expected this with the war and Covid affecting everything. The other piece that wasn’t mentioned is rising interest rates that will definitely affect automobile sales

glamglam

I agree. However, the chip shortage has been going on now for over a year or more, so production has already decreased because of it, but I don't think that it will decrease even more because of it. That's because the chip shortage has already affected production.

justim

The shortage can absolutely get worse. For all we know the March 16th earthquake in Japan has affected a supplier that ships components worldwide for Toyota.