When Toyota purchased 8.7 percent of Fuji Heavy Industries about 18 months ago, Toyota gained vital capacity for its best-selling Camry due to excess capacity at Subaru's Indiana plant. Now the two companies are swapping 100-150 engineers in order to find further synergies between the two automakers.
Toyota, with its magnificent manufacturing system and hybrid technology, has plenty to offer, but Subaru has its world-renown AWD system in its war chest. The fruits of the union of Toyota and Subaru are just now coming to light, as the Camry is now
being produced in Subaru's Indiana plant, which adds another 100,000 units to Toyota's vanilla-mobile, and Subaru gets the economy of scale that comes with a fully-utilized plant.
We can tell Toyota and Subaru have been collaborating, mostly because the new Impreza looks like a slightly better-looking Corolla. Lets hope that somehow the guys and girls from Aichi Japan can figure out how to put some of the driving spirit in the Legacy and WRX into future Toyotas.
[Source: Wards Auto]
