Word: georgetown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maybe I-64 should be renamed Toyota Road. Along the 500-mile stretch of interstate that winds past Georgetown and Princeton on its way from West Virginia to St. Louis, Missouri, the world's No. 3 automaker--after General Motors and Ford--has quietly become America's fastest growing automaker. Amid the rich corn, wheat and soybean fields, Toyota is building a vast industrial empire in the center of America's heartland, with I-64 as the hub for some $8 billion of North American investments. By 2000 Toyota hopes the public will view the company as the fourth member...
...starters, Toyota is adding a new line of minivans to its $3.4 billion plant in Georgetown, where Camrys and Avalons are now produced, and tripling the output of its St. Louis-based Bodine Aluminum subsidiary, which makes engine components. Next will come a new $400 million engine plant in Buffalo, West Virginia, and the T100 pickup plant in Princeton. Toyota is expanding other facilities, like its Corolla factory in Cambridge, Ontario. There's a $310 million technical center abuilding in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Toyota recently opened the world's largest proving ground, a 12,000-acre property outside Phoenix, Arizona...
...swift U.S. buildup by Toyota and rivals like Honda has revitalized whole communities. A University of Kentucky study credits Toyota's Georgetown presence with creating 22,000 jobs in the state (the plant itself employs 6,500) and adding $1.5 billion to the state's economy during its eight years in operation. Soaring property-tax rolls have enabled Georgetown to build new police and fire stations and community-care facilities. In Princeton property values are taking...
However long that takes, Toyota has already created a corn-fed hybrid of East and West along the I-64 corridor. About half of Toyota's top 100 executives in the U.S. are American. And there are about 50 Japanese in the 6,500 person work force at the Georgetown plant. At the Tachibana sushi bar in nearby Lexington, Kentucky, manager Takashi Iwata serves raw fish to Japanese diners as well as to locals raised on burgers and barbecued ribs. "I am happiest when I have customers in cowboy shirts using chopsticks," Iwata says. "But to tell you the truth...
...freighter Toyota Maru in Long Beach, California. Yet even as Toyota improved its cars and gained market share, the company remained reluctant to build them on American soil. Not until 1985, when Honda and Nissan were already producing cars in the U.S., did Toyota decide to build the Georgetown plant. The company has since been at pains to avoid such stereotypes as those spoofed in the 1986 Michael Keaton comedy, Gung Ho, which depicted Japanese managers holding fire drill-like pep rallies and speeding up assembly lines to a Chaplinesque frenzy. Toyota responded in methodical fashion: it bought copies...