Although Toyota announced plans to officially enter the electric vehicle field at the end of last year, do you think Toyota will abandon the internal combustion engine? In fact, Toyota said that the four-cylinder internal combustion engine still has a lot of room for development. Toyota will reportedly upgrade its engine production line in the United States, which will be used in internal combustion engines and hybrid models.
Toyota North America Branch said on the 19th that Toyota will invest 383 million US dollars in the US engine production line, the investment is mainly used for research and development and production of four-cylinder engines, and distributed to four production bases, and the future four-cylinder engine will be "the core of the new Toyota and Lexus motors".
The largest portion of these investments will go to Toyota's plant in Huntsville, Alabama, whereby the $222 million will be allocated to Toyota's Huntsville plant in Alabama to build a new line of fuel and hybrid four-cylinder engines, which currently produces 900,000 engines per year and will be expanded by 12,600 square meters in the future.
In addition, the remaining $109 million will be invested in a plant in Troy, Missouri, which will also be used to increase the manufacture of the cylinder heads of four-cylinder engines. The Jackson, Tennessee plant will also receive a $36 million investment to build a four-cylinder engine block. Finally, the plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, will receive $16 million to expand the flexibility of its four-cylinder engine production line. The site can build up to 600,000 power plants per year.
Of course, big factories like Toyota walk on two legs. Looking back, Toyota announced a total of $5.1 billion in new investments in its U.S. manufacturing operations in 2021 to support its electrification process. It can be seen that Toyota does not want to be behind Tesla in the era of electrification.