Japan with a similar number of defects per 100 vehicles. In 1991, Toyota started building the Toyota Hilux (also known as the Toyota Pickup) at NUMMI, allowing the company to completely avoid the chicken tax, a 25 percent tariff on light trucks imposed in 1964. The company had been avoiding a big portion of the tax since 1972 by importing the truck as an incomplete chassis cab (which included the entire truck, less the truck bed) which only faced a 4% tariff. Once in the United States, Toyota Auto Body California (TABC) would produce the truck beds and attach them to the trucks. TABC was the first manufacturing investment in the U.S. for Toyota. In January 1995, it began producing the Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. NUMMI did face some financial challenges, with cars costing more to build than at other GM plants and only operating at 58.6% capacity by 1988. The plant had not reached break-even by 1991. Up to May 2010, NUMMI built an average of 6,000 vehicles a week, or nearly eight million cars and trucks since opening in 1984. In 1997, NUMMI produced 357,809 cars and trucks. Production reached its annual peak of 428,633 units in 2006. The end of the joint venture Toyota took the lessons it learned from NUMMI and went on to establish the wholly-owned Toyota Motor Manufacturing USA (later renamed Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plants in 1986, and by 2009 the company was operating a dozen manufacturing facilities in North America. However, NUMMI remained Toyota's only unionized plant in the U.S. GM executives, particularly CEO John F. Smith Jr., attempted to spread the Toyota Production System to other assembly plants, but it proved largely unsuccessful. Despite having a front row seat to learn about the production system, by 1998 (15 years later) GM had still not been able to implement lean manufacturing in the rest of the United States, though GM managers trained at NUMMI were successful in introducing the approach to its unionized factories in Brazil. By 2009, GM was in serious financial trouble and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. In April the company confirmed its commitment to NUMMI and in June announced that it was scrapping the Pontiac brand which would end production of the Corolla-derived Pontiac Vibe at NUMMI by August 2009. That triggered several months of discussions between the automakers, trying to find