Toyota’s North American Assembly Pace Picks Up After Floods

Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) is resuming plans to run its North American auto-assembly plants overtime next week as Asia’s largest automaker rebounds from parts shortages triggered by flooding in Thailand.

Workers at Toyota plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico will work additional hours starting Nov. 14, and Toyota’s vehicle factories in Indiana and Ontario will also work on Saturday, Nov. 19, the company said in a statement today.

“We’re getting back to that higher-than-normal production rate we’d been planning on,” Mike Goss, a spokesman for Toyota’s production unit in Erlanger, Kentucky, said in a phone interview today. “It’s all about the availability of parts. It remains a very dynamic situation.”

Thailand’s floods disrupted plans by both Toyota and Honda Motor Co. for a production rebound in the year’s final months after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami limited their global output for five months. Before the floods, which cut supplies of electronics, plastic and rubber components, Toyota had said it would run North American plants at least 15 percent above a target the company set at the start of 2011, prior to the quake.

Toyota, based in Toyota City, Japan, also said today it will resume vehicle production in Thailand on Nov. 21.

Honda yesterday said six plants in the U.S. and Canada are running at 50 percent to 75 percent of planned output, exceeding the 50 percent rate the automaker expected as of Oct. 31.

Honda, based in Tokyo, is getting more parts from both alternative sources and original suppliers and “can confidently say we don’t have to do 50 percent much longer,” Ed Miller, a Honda spokesman, said yesterday.

Toyota’s U.S. sales unit is based in Torrance, California. The company’s American depositary receipts fell 1.1 percent to $63.89 at 2:50 p.m. New York New York time. Honda’s American depositary receipts slid 3.4 percent to $29.24.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Ohnsman in Los Angeles at aohnsman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jamie Butters at jbutters@bloomberg.net