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Toyota investing $30 million in Indiana for more Highlander production

Indiana seems like the place to be if you're looking for work in a car factory. In May, Subaru announced plans to invest $400 million in its Lafayette, Indiana plant, creating 900 new jobs in the process and increasing capacity to 300,000 units per year. Now, Toyota has announced plans to invest $30 million in its Princeton, Indiana plant, 170 miles south of the Subaru factory, which also builds the Camry.
Toyota's investment will create an additional 200 jobs and increase the factory's volume by 15,000 units. Toyota announced an investment in the plant in February of 2012 that bumped volume up from 300,000 to 350,000 units. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana, as the Princeton facility is officially known, produces the recently revised Toyota Highlander, the Sequoia and the Sienna. It employs 4,500 people, and this announcement represents Toyota's tenth production increase in under two years.
Scroll down below for the official announcement.

Total auto recalls already on record pace in 2014

If you've noticed that there have been more recalls than usual this year, you may be on to something. According to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US market is on pace to break a record for recalls. In 2013, 22 million cars were recalled. We're only a third of the way through 2014, though, and we've already halved that figure, with 11 million units recalled. That's wild.
Considering the past few months, it shouldn't be a surprise that General Motors is leading the charge, with six million of the 11 million units recalled coming from one of the General's four brands. Between truck recalls, CUV recalls and the ignition switch recall, 2014 hasn't been a great year for GM.
Other recall leaders include Nissan (one million Sentra and Altima sedans), Honda (900,000 Odyssey minivans), Toyota (over one million units in a few recalls), Volkswagen (150,000 Passat sedans), Chrysler (644,000 Dodge Durango and Jeep Grand Cherokee SUVs) and most recently, Ford (434,000 units, the bulk of which were early Ford Escape CUVs). So while it's been a bad year for GM so far, its competitors aren't doing too well, either.

Watch Congress sample Toyota's i-Road 3-wheeler concept

Toyota brought its new i-Road, a three-wheeled, all-electric low-speed vehicle that debuted in 2013 at the Geneva Motor Show, to the Capitol for some of our elected officials to test out. As easy as it is to forget that politicians are people, too, it was refreshing to see a human side to many of them as they zipped about one of the Capitol's many meeting rooms.
We'd say their reactions were surprisingly positive. Of course, some were just down there because Toyota is a big presence in their respective districts, but the bulk of the senators and representatives seemed like they just wanted to zip about the makeshift indoor course on the leaning trike.
Take a look below at the video from Bloomberg.