Toyota’s research and development facility at Mulgrave will shut, with over 100 high-skilled engineering jobs to be shed.
Motoring.com.au reports that the Toyota Technical Centre Australia will be shut by June next year.
The company had said last year that it intended to keep the centre open in as a much smaller operation, but this was reconsidered as unviable.
“The decision for us was that a minimum we’d have to scale back and we communicated that to our staff in February 2014,” Max Gillard, president of TTC-AU told Wheels.
But now we’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t remain as an operation in Australia and that we will close.”
The centre is one of only five in the world for the Japan-based car maker. It has been open since 2003. Of 160 staff, motoring.com.au reports that 19 will be redeployed within Australia and around 30 would relocate to the USA or Japan.
Toyota will, like General Motors Holden, end its Australian car assembly operations in 2017, following Ford’s closure of its Geelong and Broadmeadows factories next year. Ford will, however, be increasing its local engineering capability.