According to Kyodo, car manufacturer Toyota will not be resuming production at the factories it had to stop earlier this month until at least Monday, October 23. In the meantime, more and more sites cease functioning following an explosion at a third-party supplier’s facility.
The explosion, the causes of which are still unknown, injured a couple of factory workers at Chuo Spring and forced the company to halt the production lines until the incident could be investigated. This delay proved crucial for Toyota, which ran out of parts and was forced to stop ten vehicle assembly lines across six facilities in Japan.
Another line was halted this week, and more are scheduled to follow suit soon, Kyodo reports. All in all, the world’s leading automaker may end up having 13 idle production lines, nearly a half of its total production capacities nationwide.
The company hopes to be able to source the missing parts from other suppliers and restart the lines as soon as possible. In turn, Chuo Spring said it was rerouting its logistics to bring in more spare parts from China, but it will not happen until at least Monday next week.
The affected factories produce such cars as the Corolla, the RAV4 and the Land Cruiser. It remains to be seen how badly the incident may affect the shipping schedules.