Toyota Auto Body California (TABC) is a manufacturing plant in

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a city in Los Angeles County, California. It is the 42nd-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 466,742 as of 2020. A charter city, Long Beach is the seventh-most populous city in California. Incorporate ...

, located at 6375 North Paramount Boulevard. Established in 1972, TABC was the first Toyota plant in North America. A subsidiary of Toyota Motor North America, the plant occupies . The plant produces sheet metal and aluminum components, weld subassemblies, steering columns, catalytic converters, and painted service parts for Toyota's North American manufacturing facilities, for export to Toyota's facilities in Japan, and for Tesla, along with producing catalytic converters and numerous past model service parts for Toyota Motor North America.

History

The plant was established to circumvent the

chicken tax The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on impor ...

, a 25 percent

tariff A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or by a supranational union on imports or exports of goods. Besides being a source of revenue for the government, import duties can also be a form of regulation of foreign trade and poli ...

on light trucks imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

and

West Germany West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...

on importation of U.S.

chicken The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domesticated junglefowl species, with attributes of wild species such as the grey and the Ceylon junglefowl that are originally from Southeastern Asia. Rooster or cock is a term for an adult m ...

. While the government said the tariff was meant to curtail importation of German-built

Volkswagen Type 2 The Volkswagen Type 2, known officially (depending on body type) as the Transporter, Kombi or Microbus, or, informally, as the Bus (US), Camper (UK) or Bulli (Germany), is a forward control light commercial vehicle introduced in 1950 by the Ge ...

s, other models were also impacted, including the

Toyota Hilux The , stylized as HiLux and historically as Hi-Lux, is a series of pickup trucks produced and marketed by the Japanese automobile manufacturer Toyota. The majority of these vehicles are sold as pickup truck or cab chassis variants, although they ...

(also known as the Toyota Pickup). Toyota found a

tariff engineering Tariff engineering refers to design and manufacturing decisions made primarily so that the manufactured good is classified at a lower rate for tariffs than it would have been absent those decisions. It is a loophole whereby an importer pays a lower ...

loophole: they could import " chassis cab" configurations (which included the entire truck, less the truck bed) with only a 4% tariff. When the trucks arrived in the United States, a truck bed would subsequently be attached to the chassis before being sent to dealers. To enable this work, Toyota struck a deal in 1971 with Atlas Fabricators, which would produce the truck beds starting in November. The partnership was successful and, in , Toyota purchased the company and renamed it Long Beach Fabricators. The plant was Toyota's first manufacturing investment in the United States. The company would change its name to Toyota Motor Manufacturing (USA) Inc. (TMM) in . The TMM name would later be used for Toyota's Kentucky assembly plant that would begin production in . On , the California plant was renamed TABC, Inc. (Toyota Auto Body California), a nod to the company's

Toyota Auto Body Toyota Auto Body ( ja, トヨタ車体) is a manufacturing subsidiary of the Toyota group based in Japan. It is headquartered in Kariya, Aichi and was established in 1945. The company has plants in the Mie and Aichi prefectures and other facilit ...

manufacturing subsidiary. Toyota would later say that TABC had a large role in building Toyota's pickup trucks into a major model in the U.S. on the same level as the Corolla and the Camry. In 1984, Toyota would establish with GM a joint-venture vehicle manufacturing plant called

NUMMI New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) was an American automobile manufacturing company in Fremont, California, jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota that opened in 1984 and closed in 2010. After the plant was closed by its owners, th ...

which would begin assembling complete Hilux trucks in the United States starting in 1991. Between 2004 and 2008, TABC was the assembly location for the first, U.S.-produced

Hino Hino may refer to: Places Estonia * Hino, Põlva County * Hino, Võru County ** Lake Hino Japan * Hino, Shiga * Hino, Tokyo * Hino, Tottori ** Hino District, Tottori ** Hino River Transportation * Hino Motors, a Japanese truck manufacturer o ...

commercial truck. , the plant produces sheet metal and aluminum components, weld subassemblies, steering columns, catalytic converters, and painted service parts for Toyota's North American manufacturing facilities, for export to Toyota's facilities in Japan, and for Tesla, along with producing catalytic converters and numerous past model service parts for Toyota Motor North America.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 1972 establishments in California Companies based in Long Beach, California Manufacturing companies based in Greater Los Angeles Motor vehicle assembly plants in California Toyota factories Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1972