Toyota sees 2010 US pickup truck sales near 1.5 mln

A top Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) executive said on Friday that U.S. pickup truck sales will reach about 1.5 million in 2010.

Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales, the Japanese automaker's U.S. sales arm, said he expects the pickup truck market to improve along with an improving economy.

The economy and housing starts will recover, Lentz said, "and with it will come full-sized truck business again. Will it be back to the 2.5 million it was headed a few years ago? I'm not sure, but will it make the 2 million mark? I think so."

Lentz said this year's U.S. full-sized sales will be 1.4 million to 1.5 million.

Lentz made his comments during a ceremony to celebrate small pickup truck Tacoma production in San Antonio.

"And then you throw on compact on top of that, we still see pickup truck markets in the 2.2 (million) to 2.5 million market going forward."

Lentz said that by the middle of this decade, U.S. annual auto sales will be 15.5 million to 16 million.

In the first seven months of 2010, Tundra sales were about 54,000, and Tacoma's about 60,500. Collectively, they are dwarfed by the Ford F-series pickup trucks, which sold about 291,000.

The celebration of Tacoma production in San Antonio comes four months after it stopped building the truck in California.

Toyota said the move consolidates its U.S. truck production into one plant. The output of the truck plant in San Antonio is designed to be split between the Tacoma and the full-sized pickup Tundra, Toyota said.

It was the disappointing sales performance of the Tundra that allowed the San Antonio plant to have room for the Tacoma, which had been made at a plant it once jointly operated with General Motors Co GM.UL in Fremont, California.

Lentz says he sees the San Antonio plant producing at its capacity of 200,000 pickup trucks as soon as possible.

"I think that this year we will sell 205,000 pickup trucks, and that's in a market that, in the retail side, is still in real recovery mode. As we look into the middle of this decade and see the market adding almost four million units in sales, you figure half of that will be on the light truck side. There is tremendous opportunity for growth," Lentz said.

Toyota spent about $1.3 billion on the San Antonio plant that opened in November 2006 and was to be the company's beachhead into the last segment of the auto industry that U.S. companies still dominate: full-sized pickups.

Then came the burst of the U.S. housing bubble, which cut into sales of big pickup trucks, which are closely tied to housing starts. Combined with record gasoline prices in 2008, and Tundra failed to meet expected sales.