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Where was your car built? A look at the trend of
Japanese Manufacturers building there cars in the
United States
On April 24th, a story was on MSNBC said
Toyota would possibly surpass General Motors as
the largest auto manufacturing company in the
world. In another recent online story,
there has been speculation that the Big 3 may
someday include one or more of the Japanese
manufacturers. This is not only because of sales,
but also because of the amount of production they
are now doing in the United States. In
this report, I want to show how U.S. Auto
production has changed for the traditional idea
of the Big 3 to a climate where the Houston
Rockets now play at the Toyota Center and the
top two truck plants for hours needed per vehicle
are Nissan.
The Spreadsheet to the right shows the top twenty
car and light truck plants in the US by the hours
per vehicle required for each unit. The listing
includes the plant name, type of vehicles
produced, and hours required per vehicle. Below
the listings are a total of the cars produced by
the top twenty plants, the number of those cars
that are foreign cars. And the percentage of
those vehicles that are foreign. The
information used to create this chart is from
2002. This means that some of the newest plants,
including the new Toyota truck plant in San
Antonio, are not included in the comparison.
This sheet shows that the Big Three do have
efficient plants, but the combination of
efficiency and production allow the seven foreign
plants in the list to produce 42 of the cars.
These maps were generated form information taken
ten years ago. Notice that even then, the
Foreign manufacturers were beginning to build
plants throughout the United States. One thing
to notice is how most new plants, including the
foreign plants avoid the clustering that was
prevalent with the older plants. Also, newer
plants are built in more rural areas. This is due
to lower properties costs as well as the ability
of the manufacturing corporation to negotiate a
better incentive package for building in a
particular area. The foreign plants also avoid
Michigan, see Region 5. Critics say that the
foreign manufacturers try to avoid heavily
unionized areas, allowing them more freedom in
how they run their plants, which would explain
why the only Michigan plant is the AAI joint
venture in Flat Rock.
The chart to the right shows the difference in
hours per vehicle for all of the major
manufacturers in the United States. The number of
hours required to build each vehicle has a direct
effect on the cost per vehicle, and therefore the
companys profits per vehicle. As you can see,
the top five companies are Japanese owned with
the sixth company, NUMMI, being a joint venture
between Toyota and General Motors. Recent reports
have said that the gap in hours per vehicle is
now closing, but the US manufacturers are not
able to match the Japanese production methods.

• Method
• The information for the project was
  obtained from a number of sources. Tiger files,
  from the US Census Bureau were used for the maps.
  These files provided more than ample detail for
  the project.
• The next source was the U.S. Environmental
  Protection Agency. The EPA provided listings of
  auto plants divided by region. These regional
  divisions were very valuable, allowing the
  information to be broken down into regions rather
  than a map of the entire United State with all
  plants marked. The only odd thing about the
  Regions was the missing numbers. There is no
  Region 1 for example.
• The next source was the Harbour Report.
  This report is generated by Harbour Consulting
  and gives an independent breakdown of
  manufacturing plants in the United States along
  with where they rank in various production
  categories.
• This report is not in normal circulation, but our
  library does have copies from some prior years.
  The Report is actually done in two phases.
• For the Map portion
• Break down the states into their regions as
  described by the EPA. Using Arc Map, go in and
  Select by attribute using the Name attribute
  to select the individual states.
• Take each individual plant and cross reference
  the listing with the EPA list. Once a plant is
  found, open the EPA report on the plant and find
  the geographic information on the plant. This
  will allow you to know where the plant is to be
  placed on the map.
• Go back to Arc Map and open the map of the region
  that contains the plant in question. Find the
  correct longitude and latitude for the plant and
  place the marker at this spot.
• Generate your output maps
• For the statistical portion
• Collect the information from the Harbour Report.
  This includes, but is not limited to each plants
  Hours-Per-Vehicles, total production, brand
  produced, and style produced.
• Enter the relevant figures into an excel
  spreadsheet.
• Enter the calculations you wish to use with the
  figures into the Excel spreadsheet. These would
  include calculations for total number of cars
  produced by the top twenty plants, number of
  foreign cars produced by the top twenty plants,
  percentage of foreign cars, etc
• Generate your output spreadsheets and charts.