Toyota Motor said it plans to spend US$170m on its vehicle assembly plant in the US state of Mississippi, according to local reports in Japan.

The automaker will retool the Blue Springs factory later this year to accommodate the next generation Corolla passenger car model, due out next year, bringing its cumulative spend at this facility to US$1.16bn.

The company said new production lines would increase the plant's capacity from the current 170,000 units per year, without confirming how much new capacity would be created. 

Some Corolla capacity would be transferred from the Cambridge, Ontario plant in Canada, which would focus on higher value vehicles such as the RAV4 SUV.

Toyota has assembled close to 4m Corollas at Cambridge since the factory opened in 1988.

Additional Corolla capacity would be shifted from Canada to a new joint venture factory the company is building with Mazda in Huntsville, Alabama.

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Toyota had previously planned to transfer all Canadian Corolla production to a new plant in Guanajuato, Mexico, where labour costs are lower. But the company decided to build pickup trucks there instead.

The company said it had now committed US$4.3bn of a planned five year, $10bn US investment programme ending in 2022.

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