Faced with booming demand for its fuel-efficient Prius hybrid car, Toyota Motor Corp. announced that it will start building the Prius at a new factory in Mississippi in late 2010. Currently the Prius is manufactured only in Japan.

The announcement also shows an advantage that Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers have over Detroit Three automakers--flexible assembly plants with the ability to quickly shift production to new models when market conditions change. The Mississippi plant where the Prius will be assembled was originally designed to build the Toyota Highlander SUV. Highlander production will be shifted to a plant in Princeton, Ind., where the full-size Tundra pickup and Sequoia SUV are built. All full- size truck production is being consolidated Toyota's San Antonio, Texas plant.

General Motors Corp. recently announced it will close four full-size truck plants because sales of big trucks are rapidly falling in the wake of $4-a-gallon-gasoline. Like Toyota, GM is trying to quickly ramp up small-car production, but the four plants it's closing aren't flexible enough to be shifted to car production. But Toyota's not perfect. In fact, its model line-up looks a lot like GM's, offering a full range of products, from compact cars to full-size SUVs. Toyota's June sales fell 21.4 percent, an even steeper drop than GM's 18.2 percent decline. And like GM, Toyota has a glut of unsold big pickups and SUVs, ompting the automaker to announce that it will suspend Sequoia production in Indiana and Tundra production in Texas for three months, starting Aug. 8

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