Toyota steps up challenge to US truck makers

Toyota broadened its assault on its Detroit-based rivals on Thursday with the launch of a new full-sized version of its Tundra pick-up truck.

The US big truck market is one of the few segments still dominated by General Motors, Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler division. While Toyota, Honda and Nissan all sell trucks, most of their vehicles have lacked the towing capacity and “muscle” image that many buyers want.

Toyota officials have compared the Tundra launch to the introduction of the luxury Lexus marque and the youth-oriented Scion brand.

“This is the beginning of a new business for us”, Jim Press, head of Toyota's US sales unit, said at the Chicago auto show, where the new Tundra was unveiled on Thursday. The new model is bigger and has a more rugged look and a more powerful V-8 engine than existing Tundras.

“We've got a lot of ranchers that use trucks out in the fields”, said John Hook, general sales manager of a Toyota dealership in Victoria, Texas. The new Tundra, he added, “puts us right in the domestics' backyard”.

High fuel prices have not hurt the truck market as badly as big sport-utility vehicles. According to Autodata, US sales of full-size pick-ups were flat last year compared with 2004, and down by a modest 1.2 per cent in January.

Ford's F-Series and GM's Chevrolet Silverado trucks were the top-selling vehicles last year, with combined sales of 1.6m vehicles. Toyota sold 126,500 of the existing Tundra model.

GM is due to launch an improved Silverado model later this year. It unveiled a new Chevrolet Avalanche full-sized truck in Chicago this week.

Toyota hopes to help defuse lingering patriotic concerns among American truck buyers by assembling the Tundra at a new plant in San Antonio, Texas, due to start production later this year. The $850m plant will have a production capacity of 200,000 vehicles a year. The current Tundra model is built at a plant in Indiana.

Mr Hook, the Texas dealer, said that when prospective customers raise concerns about buying an “import”, he reminds them that GM and Ford build some of their trucks at plants in Mexico. “We've converted quite a few of them”, he added.

In other moves to deepen its roots in the blue-collar heartland, Toyota announced last month that it would enter cars in Nascar's Nextel Cup and Busch Series. Toyota became a sponsor of Nascar's Craftsman series, reserved for trucks, in 2004.