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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.

Mystery shoppers love Infiniti, hate Tesla

Infiniti, followed by Lexus tied with Mercedes-Benz took the top two spots for best sales experience according to mystery shoppers from the latest Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index, while EV manufacturer Tesla recorded the lowest overall score. Not surprisingly, premium brands dominated the top ranks. Including the three already mentioned, luxury brands occupied seven of the top ten spots and included Audi, BMW, Porsche, and the only American brand to crack the upper echelon, Cadillac. Toyota, Volkswagen, and Nissan rounded out the first ten positions. The news for domestic automakers isn't good. Aside from Caddy, the only other star-spangled automaker to score above the industry average is Chrysler. The rest of FCA, most of GM, and all of Ford fell below the line. But Pied Piper's mystery shoppers handed Tesla the biggest walloping – the company is ten full points below the next lowest brand, Volvo, and its score of 86 is 17 below the average of 103. It's baffling, considering the company's touted direct-sales model. "Tesla leaves me scratching my head," Fred O'Hagan, Pied Piper's president and CEO, told Wards Auto. "They own all of their stores, so you would think each one would be doing the same thing. But they're not. Tesla is consistent in its inconsistencies." O'Hagan added that there's a "huge variation" in Tesla's store-to-store effectiveness, and that in some cases, shoppers found showroom workers that acted more like "museum curators," Wards Auto reports. It might be popular to call Tesla the Apple of the car world, but based on Pied Piper's work, the brand has a long way to go to emulate the uniform shopping experience of an Apple Store. The news might be bad for Tesla, but even for the brands that scored below average, there's cause for celebration. Only Tesla and Mini lost points in this year's rankings, and only Mercedes and Lincoln held steady. Every other brand, including Infiniti, which topped the index for the first time, gained at least one point. The biggest improvements belong to Porsche, Land Rover, and Mitsubishi, which all jumped five points. Pied Piper's annual Prospect Satisfaction Index uses mystery shoppers – over 6,100 this year – from across the country to assess dealers and generate rankings from over 50 individual factors. News Source: Pied Piper via WardsAuto Green Audi BMW Cadillac Chrysler Infiniti Lexus Mercedes-Benz Nissan Tesla Toyota Car Buying Car Dealers study

Watch the Muppets go for ice cream in a Toyota

Do Muppets drive? We're not sure it's necessarily a good idea, but it's been known to happen. Fozzy called his hibernating uncle's Studebaker a bear's "natural habitat," and Doctor Teeth wouldn't get the Electric Mayhem very far without his band's psychedelically painted school bus. But how about Rolf in a 2014 Toyota Highlander?
That's what we got a glimpse of in the run-up to the Super Bowl, and the same combination (plus one Rizzo the Rat) that features in this adorably ordinary video below. Ordinary because it's just a couple of guys going out for an ice cream. Adorable because, well... they're Muppets. See what we mean in the surprisingly entertaining two-minute clip below.