Fuji Heavy Industries, the maker of Subaru cars, has announced that it is refurbishing its Oizumi plant in Gunma Prefecture, Japan with a view to expansion of building capacity and a switching of product manufacturing lines. It is set to spend around 40 billion yen to do so.
The company is set to withdraw from its mini-car development and production, and will switch over to building larger vehicles. From next year, through an OEM agreement, it will begin buying minicars from Toyota group member Daihatsu and selling them as Subarus.
The plant at Gunma, which currently has a build capacity of 80,000 vehicles a year, will be upgraded and output will be almost doubled to around 150,000 units annually. Oizumi will be primarily responsible for building the new sports cars planned and designed by Toyota and developed by Fuji Heavy, namely the Toyota FT-86 and Subaru 0846, which is set to begin sales as early as spring next year, reports say.
Though the lineup is as yet unfinalised, the plant is also set to build other models in the Subaru lineup, such as the Legacy, the Impreza and the Forester, to fully utilise production capacity.
Elsewhere, the company is aiming to increase its production capacity for its boxer engine by 160% to 820,000 units a year by fiscal 2015, the reports add. It will start changing production lines for its older engines with lines for the new third-generation, horizontally opposed four-cylinder boxer, which debuted in the Forester last October and is available in 2.0 and 2.5 litre displacements.
With the intention to sell 900,000 vehicles worldwide in 2015, the company has determined that a substantial increase in engine build output is needed to match those numbers. Subaru is also looking at doubling its build capacity for its CVT transmissions to between 700,000 and 800,000 units.
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