The world’s most selling auto brand, Toyota Motor has just announced on the 18^th of September, 2013 that the company will start the production of the RAV4 SUV at its manufacturing facility located in St. Petersburg, Russia from the year 2016. The Japanese car major has taken this decision in order to cater to the increasing demand of the SUV in the car market of Russia.

The Toyota RAV4 Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) is a very powerful and efficient vehicle and the new RAV4 is all the more popular among the global car consumers. In the car market of Russia the RAV4 SUV has been constantly growing in popularity and the Japanese car major is finding it difficult to keep up with the increased demand of the vehicle. Toyota also likes to produce a vehicle in the region it is sold most in order to meet customer demands in a better way, and thus the decision of the company to start the production of RAV4 in the Russian plant.

Toyota will be bringing in the auto parts of the RAV4 as the imported complete knock down (CKD) units and then the company will assemble the car at its plant in St. Petersburg. Thus, the Russian factory will be responsible to assemble the car’s final form the imported car components.

In order to start the production of the RAV4 SUV in Russia, the Japanese car giant is contemplating an investment of around ¥18 billion. This investment would help the company Russian car plant to increase its current production lines in order to produce around 50,000 more vehicles every year. The St. Petersburg manufacturing facility has the potential of churning out around 50,000 units of the extremely popular Toyota Camry sedan per year.

At present, the Toyota RAV4 SUV is the bestselling vehicle from the company in the car market of Russia. The Russian sales of the RAV4 SUV are recorded at around 27,000 units in the time period between January and August in the current year of 2013.

Toyota Motor is still producing the very popular RAV4 SUV at the company’s Tahara car factory located in Aichi Prefecture and at the Nagakusa manufacturing facility, in Oita Prefecture, from where the vehicles are shipped to the Russian car market as completely built units.

Apart from the production expansion plans at Toyota’s Russian car factory, the Japanese car major also revealed on September 19, that the company will be investing around ¥17 billion in order to increase the production capacity of the factory in Argentina by over 50 percent to cater to the expected demand spurt in Latin American car market.

The Latin American subsidiary of the Japanese car major, Toyota Argentina SA will be responsible for increasing the capacity of its Zarate factory to 140,000 vehicles from the current capacity of producing 92,000 vehicles by the end of the year 2015.

The Zarate facility produces the Hilux pickup trucks and the Fortuner SUVs that are very important models from Toyota and are major volume drawers in the developing markets.

Tagged: Toyota