Mazda Motor Corporation has just announced that it will be building Toyota vehicles at the Mazda plant in Mexico. The manufacturing facility, which is currently under construction, will produce a Toyota-brand vehicle for sale mainly in North America. The sub-compact Toyota will be based off the Mazda2 and will start production around the summer of 2015 at a pace of 50,000 units per year.
Mazda's plant in Mexico is scheduled to start production by March 2014 with Toyota investing an "appropriate" portion of production equipment costs and development costs related to the Toyota vehicle and also an appropriate portion of costs related to the plant's production capacity increase.
Currently, the Mazda Mexico plant is scheduled to produce the Mazda2 and Mazda3 vehicles with an annual capacity of 140,000 units.
This could mean we'll see all-new Mazda2 before the summer of 2015 (perhaps as early as late 2013 or 2014), and that the all-new Toyota Yaris will be relegated to service in Europe and Asia while Toyota will be getting their own sub-compact car.
