As demand for trucks and SUVs declines in the U.S., an official at Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America said the automaker is considering exporting some of the trucks and SUVs it makes at its current U.S. truck plants to other markets. Erlanger, Ky.-based Toyota announced in July it has decided to make hybrid vehicles at a Mississippi plant under construction rather than the SUVs the plant was originally supposed to build.

At a recent automotive industry conference, Steve St. Angelo, senior vice president of Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing in North America, said Toyota was evaluating the idea of exporting the Tundra and Sequoia built in the U.S. market. The move could also be a major boost to Toyota's supply base in the U.S. Toyota's new plant in Mississippi due to open in 2010 will leverage more local suppliers than ever before.

In a recent interview with Purchasing, Chris Nielsen, vice president of purchasing at Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, said the latest version of the Tundra made in the U.S. is built from 90% parts sourced in the U.S. Toyota currently has 13 manufacturing sites in the U.S. with two more planned. By 2010, it expects to have capacity to build 2.2 million vehicles in the U.S.

"As we continue to localize our production, our supply base will continue to localize as well," Nielsen told Purchasing.

Toyota would not be the first automaker to export vehicles from the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chrysler is already exporting a significant number of vehicles from a car plant in Illinois, and later this year, General Motors will begin shipping the Buick Enclave SUV made in Lansing, Mich., to China with the hopes eventually to export as many as 25,000 Enclaves a year to China.

But despite the best laid plans of automotive OEMs, the turmoil in the U.S. automotive market is taking its toll on OEM-supplier relations. According to a new survey by industry researcher Planning Perspectives, all but one (Ford) of the six North American automakers are getting lower rankings from suppliers in today's market. While Toyota remains the OEM with the highest ranking in the Working Relations survey, Toyota's ranking among suppliers dropped from an all-time high of 415 last year to 367, a 48-point decline which is the largest drop in points by an automaker in the history of the study. However, Chrysler and Nissan also saw major percentage-based declines in their supplier rankings (see table) while Ford was the only North American OEM to see an increase.

"In the years we've been conducting this study, we've never seen such dramatic year-over-year shifts in the rankings of the six domestic and foreign domestic automakers," says John Henke, president and CEO of Planning Perspectives in Rochester, Mich. "This could signal a new chapter in OEM supplier relations going forward."