The Toyota Tacoma has ceded about 20 points of market
The Toyota Tacoma has ceded about 20 points of market
DETROIT — The Toyota Tacoma has ceded about 20 points of market share in midsize pickups since General Motors re-entered the segment in late 2014. And now, Toyota's bracing for the return of another formidable competitor, the Ford Ranger, showcased this month at the Detroit auto show. Oh, and another: Jeep's long-awaited Wrangler- based pickup. And not far behind is the redesign of Nissan's Frontier.
The competitive barrage could be tough for the Tacoma, the segment leader for more than a decade.
Then again, it also could be an opportunity for the burly Toyota to kick sand in the face of yet another challenger. After all, even as GM muscled in with 114,507 sales of Chevrolet Colorados and GMC Canyons in 2015, the Tacoma's sales rose 16 percent.
"I think the more, the merrier," Jim Lentz, CEO of Toyota North America, told Automotive News on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show. "I think there's just going to be more people shopping that segment. So I think that segment is going to grow."
That's the kind of thing confident market leaders like to say when they're about to face new competition, but Lentz and Toyota have a high-stakes wager riding on the outcome. Toyota is betting almost a billion dollars on increased Tacoma production in North America at an expanded plant in Tijuana, Mexico, and a factory under construction in central Mexico.
For many years, factory constraints were the only thing holding back the Tacoma, whose inventories run notoriously tight. The Mexico investments, along with a realignment at Toyota's truck plant in Texas, would add about 100,000 vehicles of net annual production capacity for the Tacoma or products based on it. Toyota would appear to have its supply problem under control.
Demand is another issue. With Ford rejoining the segment early next year, and Jeep following by mid-2019, there will be more than a half dozen vehicles battling in a segment that grew less than 1 percent last year after a 25 percent jump in 2016.
What's more, much of the fresh competition comes from Detroit companies that, in the full-size category at least, have strong track records of innovative trucks and legions of brand-loyal customers. And they now have far more resources to invest in product and marketing than they did when they fled the market.
"I would draw a parallel between a Tacoma and the Chrysler minivans of the 1980s," said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book. "These guys owned that market share completely, and then it slowly got chipped away as other players jumped in."
