Toyota will extend production of its Solara convertible for up to two years.

Toyota

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Toyota Motor Corp. has decided to extend production of its Solara convertible for up to two more years, the automaker’s North American manufacturing chief announced last week.

Steve St. Angelo, senior vice president of Toyota North American manufacturing operations and president of the factories that produce the Solara and related models, said the automaker decided not to end the model’s run this month in response to market demands. The Solara coupe, which has already discontinued, was based on the top-selling Camry midsize sedan.

“It was a car that our customers demanded. They wanted it,” St. Angelo said after a speech at the Management Briefing Seminars in Traverse City.

“I was pushing for it,” St. Angelo said.

The challenging part will be continuing to produce the 1,000 Solara convertibles at the Georgetown, Ky., complex along with the Camry, Camry hybrid, Avalon and 4- and 6-cylinder engines while launching the all-new Venza crossover.

The Camry-based Venza, which debuted at the Detroit auto show in January, is scheduled to go on sale later this year. It was designed at Toyota’s Calty design center in Ann Arbor Township, Mich., and engineered at Toyota’s research and engineering center in Ann Arbor, Toyota said.

Despite the rapid changes in the North American automotive industry, caused by a weakened U.S. economy and gas that exceeded $4 a gallon for nearly two months, St. Angelo said Toyota has the right products and the right manufacturing plan for the U.S. market.

Toyota stopped making Tundra full-size pickups and Sequoia SUVs until November. At that point, Tundras will only be made at its San Antonio assembly plant. The Princeton, Ind., plant that launched the previous-generation Tundra will add the Highlander crossover SUV to its mix in the fall of 2009.

An assembly plant under construction in Blue Springs, Miss., originally planned for Highlander production, will start making Prius hybrids in 2010.

Toyota announced the assembly-plant shifts just a month ago, in response to rapidly changing consumer tastes, which are believed to be relatively permanent with oil priced well above $100 a barrel.

“If you asked me a year ago, I would have never guessed we would have been in this situation with gas prices over $4 a gallon,” St. Angelo said.

This year, Toyota has been stung like many other automakers with declining pickup and SUV sales and has struggled to produce enough small cars to meet increasing demand. Total U.S. sales of Toyota, Lexus and Scion vehicles sales fell 11.9 percent in July and are down 7.6 percent so far this year.

But in a market that is off 10.5 percent, Toyota has gained half a point of share: Toyota’s three brands combine for 16.8 percent of the U.S. market, second only to General Motors Corp., up from 16.3 percent for the first seven months of 2007.

“We believe we have the right products, even in a down market,” St. Angelo said.