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

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a coastal city in southeastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is the list of United States cities by population, 44th-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 451,307 as of 2022. A charter ci ...

. Established in 1972, TABC was the first Toyota plant in North America. A subsidiary of

Toyota Motor North America Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) is the operating subsidiary that oversees all operations of the Toyota Motor Corporation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Its operations include research and development, manufacturing, sales, market ...

, 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 as 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 imp ...

, a 25 percent

tariff A tariff or import tax is a duty (tax), duty imposed by a national Government, government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods ...

light truck Light truck or light-duty truck is a US classification for vehicles with a gross vehicle weight up to and a payload capacity up to . Similar goods vehicle classes in the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are termed light ...

s imposed in 1964 by the United States under President

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had served a ...

in response to tariffs placed by

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

and

West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...

on importation of U.S.

chicken The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domesticated subspecies of the red junglefowl (''Gallus gallus''), originally native to Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated around 8,000 years ago and is now one of the most common and w ...

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

Volkswagen Type 2 The Volkswagen Transporter, initially the Type 2, is a range of light commercial vehicles, built as vans, pickups, and cab-and-chassis variants, introduced in 1950 by the German automotive industry, automaker Volkswagen as their second mass ...

s, other models were also impacted, including the

Toyota Hilux The , stylised 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 a pickup truck or cab chassis, although they coul ...

(also known as the Toyota Pickup). Toyota found a tariff engineering 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 be locally built and attached to the chassis before being sent to dealers. To do this work, Toyota struck a deal in 1971 with Atlas Fabricators, which would begin producing the truck beds and installing them starting in November. The partnership was successful and, in February 1974, 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 March 1980. The TMM name would later be used for Toyota's Kentucky assembly plant that would begin production in May 1988. On June 6, 1988, the California plant was renamed TABC, Inc. (Toyota Auto Body California), a nod to the company's

Toyota Auto Body Toyota Auto Body () 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 Prefecture, Mie and Aichi Prefecture, Aichi prefectures and ...

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 established a joint-venture vehicle manufacturing plant with

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

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 April 2010. The plant is located in the East Ind ...

(New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.), which would begin assembling complete Hilux trucks in the United States starting in 1990 for the 1991 model year. However, TABC would continue to complete final assembly on trucks imported from Japan through the 1995 model year, when NUMMI began full-scale production of the Tacoma, a pickup truck designed exclusively for the North American market. Between 2004 and 2008, TABC was the assembly location for the first U.S.-produced

Hino Motors Hino Motors, Ltd., commonly known as Hino, is a Japanese manufacturer of commercial vehicles and diesel engines (including those for trucks, buses and other vehicles) headquartered in Hino, Tokyo. The company was established in 1942 as a corpora ...

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 and for export to Toyota's facilities in Japan, 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