End of line as last Aussie Toyota built
Toyota Australia has just built its final car for New Zealand, a week before closing the doors on vehicle assembly for good. Rob Maetzig reports.
Last week a petrol-engined Camry GL rolled off the line at Toyota Australia’s assembly plant at Altona in Melbourne’s western suburbs – the last Australian-built Toyota bound for New Zealand.
The sedan will be shipped to Auckland to join 349 other Australian-built Camrys and V6 Aurions to be sold throughout New Zealand between now and early 2018.
The next generation of New Zealand Camrys will be imported from Japan in hybrid, fourcylinder and V6 petrol forms.
The Altona plant stopped assembling cars on Tuesday with the loss of 2300 jobs. The closure will be part of total destruction of the Australian vehicle assembly industry – Ford shut its assembly down in October 2016 and Holden is scheduled to stop assembly operations on October 20.
When the final worker downs tools, it will end more than 90 years of vehicle assembly in Australia. During that time Holden has built more than 7 million vehicles, Ford close to 6 million, and Toyota close to 3.4 million. It’s been a massive manufacturing operation. But despite those numbers, Australian vehicle assembly has become increasingly expensive on a world scale because it has been too small – so it is having to close.
New Zealand has already been through all of this. In fact it was exactly 20 years ago when Toyota New Zealand shut down its assembly operations in Thames, the last car company in the country to do so.
Since then Toyota NZ has sourced its product from all over the world – Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Thailand, and, of course, Australia where up until August it had sourced and sold 46,150 Altona-built Camrys and 4998 Aurions.
The last Nz-bound Aussie Aurion was built on August 17, the last Camry hybrid was produced on September 15 and the last petrol-engined Camry rolled off the line last Wednesday.
Toyota NZ’S general manager of sales and operations Steve Prangnell is confident that New Zealand’s remaining 350 Australian-built Camrys and Aurions will be sufficient to meet demand until a brand new Japanese-built model is launched during the first quarter of 2018.
The company is using the new model’s arrival to rationalise the composition of the Camry/aurion fleet. Whereas currently there are two petrol versions, three hybrids and two Aurions, the new selection will comprise a single entry-specification GL petrol model, three hybrids and one Camry V6.
‘‘We’re planning for at least 70 per cent of future Camry sales to be hybrids. We’re estimating we will sell 900 of the new Camrys next year, and that around 630 of them will be the hybrids,’’ says Prangnell. ’’It will be part of Toyota New Zealand’s commitment to the Government to reduce the CO2 emissions to 30 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030. At the moment our vehicle emissions are averaging 218g/100km of CO2 – we need to get them to 154g/100km.’’
Further product to be added to the Toyota fleet in New Zealand will help, Prangnell adds. These will include a new-generation plug-in Prius, a RAV4 hybrid, and whatever new pure electricity product will emerge via a recently announced joint venture with Mazda.
New Zealand has always enjoyed a close relationship with the Altona facility – this country was Toyota Australia’s first export customer.
Since 1997 not only have the Camrys, Aurions and, for a short time, the Avalon been sourced from that factory, but staff from the Thames plant, now used to refurbish the Signature Series used cars, have regularly travelled there for specialist training.
Now it will be the turn of New Zealand to help Australia, says Prangnell.
‘‘Since the closure of Thames assembly we have been a sales and distribution operation. So there’s a whole lot of stuff we know, including how to operate in an open market.
‘‘So we’ll be helping the Toyota Australia people as they make that transition.’’
Prangnell admits the closure of Altona and the mass loss of jobs will be sad occasion – just as it was a sad time when Thames assembly shut down.
‘‘But the practicality is that in this part of the world we are technology takers. It’s as simple as that,’’ he says.