Toyota is closing its Kentucky engineering facility and moving the operations to its headquarters campus in Plano, Texas.
Toyota is accelerating its efforts to consolidate its North American operations in Texas, shuttering its Kentucky-based engineering hub next year.
The Japanese maker has been centralizing many of its units within its Plano, Texas headquarters campus that it opened last year after moving from California.
The company informed Kentucky officials of its plans to close its Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing facility in Erlanger, Kentucky, which is just south of Cincinnati, Ohio, by the end of 2017.
The move will affect 648 employees, the company notes, with layoffs starting the first week of January and running through the end of 2018. The company’s technical headquarters, the Erlanger facility opened in 1996.
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With the move to Texas, Toyota has been moving operations from locations in California, Kentucky and New York. The Erlanger site provided support for the automaker’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is less than an hour south of Erlanger.
“Although Toyota’s Erlanger-based headquarters will eventually move, we know that a continued strong presence in Kentucky is central to Toyota’s ongoing success,” Toyota North American CEO James Lentz said in a letter to then Gov. Steve Beshear in 2014, USA Today reported.
“We want to make clear that Toyota’s roots will remain deep in this state, and we plan to maintain a strong presence in Kentucky for decades to come.”
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The company has basically completed the move from its former headquarters location in Torrance, California, to the Plano campus. While it’s consolidating some of its operations there, others, such as its Technical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, continue to grow.
Earlier this year, it announced that it would partner with the University of Michigan and share the 32-acre MCity self-driving research facility also used by domestic rivals Ford Motor Co. and General Motors for its autonomous driving research.
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Toyota also operates two major technical centers and its own test track within a short drive from where its new autonomous research center will be located in the university town of Ann Arbor.