DETROIT -- Toyota Motor Corp. is tapping the brakes on production of big pickups and sport-utility vehicles in its Texas and Indiana plants as part of a response to slowing demand for those types of trucks in the U.S. market.

As a first step, the Japanese company over the past several weeks has cut the pace of production of full-size Tundra pickup trucks and Sequoia SUVs at the Texas and Indiana plants, Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said Thursday. He declined to elaborate on the reduction in output. The move stems from increasingly sluggish demand for those vehicles in the face of record gasoline prices, among other reasons.

"We are slowing down the assembly to reflect the market," Mr. Goss said. He noted that there would be no layoffs as a result of the move at both manufacturing sites. Toyota is going to keep "all of our people employed" at those plants, he said.

Toyota's San Antonio plant has capacity to produce 200,000 full-size Tundra pickup trucks a year. The company can also produce Tundras in Princeton, Ind., at a pace of 100,000 vehicles a year. The Indiana plant also produces Sequoias on the same assembly line that produces the Tundra.

Additionally, in order to boost production at the Texas plant and keep it more fully utilized, company executives who spoke on condition of anonymity said Toyota has begun weighing an option of shifting Tundra production completely out of Indiana and consolidating that work in San Antonio. A final decision on the move is still pending and is not expected to be made for a while, the executives said.

If Toyota decided to consolidate Tundra production into Texas, as one option, the Japanese auto maker would make one of the two assembly lines in Indiana, which currently can produce a total of 150,000 Tundras and Sequoias in two shifts, a single-shift line dedicated to produce the Sequoia. It would produce as many Sequoia SUVs as possible in that case and try to "weather the storm," as one of the executives put it.

The other option, the executives said, is to introduce an additional vehicle, probably a fuel-efficient car-SUV crossover, for the Indiana plant and produce it on the Sequoia line and try to keep it as a two-shift fully utilized assembly line.

Toyota last year decided to build a new plant in Mississippi to produce the Highlander car-SUV crossover at a pace of 150,000 vehicles a year. "We really didn't have to do that; we could have used excess capacity we have with the Tundra and the Sequoia to produce Highlanders," one of the executives said.

Toyota spokesman Mr. Goss said Toyota is weighing "all kinds of options but no decisions have been made on moving products around."

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source: www.wsj.com