trade deficit with Japan at $9 billion for 1980, up from $8.7 billion in 1979.)įor the United States, Jones said, one big advantage to producing Japanese parts - as opposed to cars - in the United States is that parts production would be labor-intensive that is, create a lot of jobs. The latter figure is roughly equal to the existing trade deficit with Japan on new cars and trucks. Jones told The Washington Post that within the next four to five years, the demand for Japanese car parts - now produced exclusively in Japan - will rise from an annual sales volume of $1.6 billion to about $8 billion. most of the spare and repair parts needed to keep the growing fleet of 12 million Japanese cars and trucks on U.S. industry by that time would finally have retooled from bigger cars to smaller ones.īut Jones, with support from President Carter's trade representative, Reubin Askew, is pushing a compromise proposal under which Japan would undertake to produce in the U.S. Jones - and the Japanese - assume that U.S. Jones agrees with the Japanese argument that by the time such plants come on line in two to three years, they would run into problems of excess capacity. James Jones (D-Okla.), chairman of an influential House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, supports the Japanese companies' resistance to UAW demands that they build plants here. assembly plants, and sought - unsuccessfully so far - the support of the Carter administration in curbing Japanese sales here. manufacturers to meet the demand for the kind of small, fuel-efficient cars produced by the Japanese, it is little wonder that the United Auto Workers Union has passionately begged the major Japanese car makers to open up U.S. No real solution has appeared and none is likely to do so. auto industry's unreadiness to cope with the demand for small cars. and Japanese officials have discussed the Japanese import "problem on a nonstop basis since the beginning of the year, when the latest round of oil price increases announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pointed up the U.S. VW sales in the United States are still relatively small as compared to Japanese sales - led by Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Mazda - of 2.1 million cars here last year. successes, VW announced that it would invest close to $800 million to open a second plant at Sterling Heights, Mich. subsidiary.Īt VW's New Scranton, Pa., plant, the company last year boosted its output to 175,170 automobiles - the equivalent of more than half of its U.S. The grim situation for General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and American Motors is really worse than implied by these figures, because "domestic" output now includes Volkswagen's growing U.S. car market, compared to 17 percent last year. Thus, Japan alone has cornered close to 22 percent of this year's U.S. market - and more than 8 out of every 10 imported cars are Japanese. So far this year, imports have captured about 26.5 percent of the U.S. With that background, it is not surprising that as the United States enters what may be a deep recession with domestic auto output down to half of normal levels, Japanese auto exports are moving along unchecked. For example, a single robotized line at Zama turns out about 50 varieties of Nissan cars, marketed in the U.S. Robots also have acquired micro-processor "brains" that allow them to switch their programs automatically. The robots that already exist - about half of which work on auto assembly lines - have acquired a 'sense of touch' and a 'sense of sight' through TV cameras. government and private estimates indicate that 16,000 robots now are at work around the world - 13,000 in Japan, 2,000 in the United States and fewer than 1,000 in Europe. Although precise figures are not available, U.S. World industry is on the verge of a boom in developments of robots and robot technology. In Europe, the productivity is even lower in West Germany, for example, it stands at 11 cars per year. In the United States, which lags far behind Japan in "robotizing," average productivity per worker per year is only 25 cars. The Zama output comes to a spectacular 67 cars per live worker per year - almost 50 percent greater than the Japanese auto industry average of 45 cars per year. Twenty miles southeast of Tokyo, about 1,750 cars a day roll out of the Zama factory owned by Nissan, Japan's second largest automaker.Īt Zama an amazing 96 percent of all the welds in the body assembly shop are produced by robots.
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