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Toyota investing $200M in Southern manufacturing

Over the past two years, Toyota has invested more than $2 billion at its North American production facilities, and it apparently doesn't plan on stopping there. To keep up with recent strong sales, Toyota is investing an additional $200 million at its engine plants in the Southern US to increase production capacity of its V6 engines.
The bulk of this money ($150 million) will go to expand Toyota's engine plant in Huntsville, AL, which is currently responsible for supplying engines - four-cylinder, V6 and V8 - to eight of Toyota's 12 domestically produced vehicles. That includes the best-selling Toyota Camry (shown above).
Toyota didn't say exactly what improvements are being made to the plant, but this follows last year's $80 million investment in the plant that is set to be completed by next year raising the engine capacity to 750,000 annual units including 362,000 V6s. The remaining $50 million will go to the casting plants of Toyota-owned Bodine Aluminum in Missouri and Tennessee, which supply engine blocks and cylinder heads to the Huntsville engine plant as well as others in Kentucky and West Virginia. Scroll down below for the official press release.

Toyota close to licensing deal with BMW for fuel cell technology

For over a year now, we've been hearing about a potential partnership between Toyota and BMW on everything from sports cars to lithium-ion batteries, but one of the first cooperative projects between these two automakers could bring Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell technology to a BMW vehicle. Reuters is reporting that an announcement is likely to be made as soon as later this week regarding a BMW fuel cell vehicle that could be in production by 2020 with a prototype running around by 2015.
The last we heard of Toyota's fuel cell technology, it was in the FCV-R Concept that we saw at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show, but there is no word how far along in development this system is. If it does come to fruition, such a vehicle for BMW would build on the automaker's commitment to hydrogen that started with the Hydrogen 7, which unlike a fuel cell vehicle, simply ran on hydrogen fuel rather than converting it to electricity for use in motors. We're definitely interested where this Toyota/BMW tie up could be headed.

HQ move based on study, not pitch from Gov. Perry, Toyota says

Toyota's surprising announcement on Monday that it will move its North American headquarters from Torrance, CA location to the Dallas suburb of Plano, TX is allegedly not due to any political wrangling from the state's Republican governor, Rick Perry.
Perry (above) has been up front in his aggressive pursuit of businesses and jobs for Texas, traveling to California, Missouri, Illinois and New York to tempt corporations to his state. And it's not just about the promise of much lower taxes, a Perry spokesman reminds Automotive News that the state boasts, "a workforce that is skilled and ready to do any job."
For his part, Jim Lentz, Toyota's North American CEO said Plano was chosen through an internal process, with the location helped by its proximity to the company's massive pickup factory in San Antonio rather than any campaigning from the governor.