The Chicken Tax was the automotive industry's most well-known tariff, at least up until President Donald Trump started senselessly slapping tariffs on everything. The Chicken Tax started as an actually reciprocal tariff when Europe imposed an import tax on American chickens in 1963, which caused a 25% loss of business for U.S. chicken exports. In retaliation, the U.S. government added imported trucks to the list of imported goods that face a 25% import tariff, which caused the prices of imported trucks to explode and become uncompetitive with American trucks. In order to circumvent the tariff, Toyota took over a former napalm factory in the port town of Long Beach, California to manufacture beds that could be bolted onto unfinished Hi-Luxes that were imported with a cab, engine, and chassis, thus qualifying as imported vehicles, not trucks.
Hagerty published a sensational article about this automotive history factoid, and as a Long Beach native who never knew this lore, I had to write about it. The original article is very detailed and I implore you to give it a read.
Read more: These Are What You Wanted As First Cars (And What You Got Instead)
From Napalm To Truck Beds
The factory that Toyota took over was occupied by Diamond Plastics in the 1960s, and one of the products produced there was the incendiary gel used in flame throwers and firebombs in the Vietnam War known as napalm. Handling such a volatile compound resulted in three reported explosions at the factory, which was located near a neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, the neighboring residents weren't enthusiastic about the production of napalm in their back yard, and they protested against it, but eventually Diamond Plastics lost its contract at the Atlas Fabricators factory, and Toyota contracted the facility to produce truck beds.
Since Toyota imported incomplete vehicles rather than trucks, the rolling cab-and-chassis were only subject to a 2.5% import tax rather than the 25% tax that affected imported trucks. After Atlas Fabricators manufactured the truck beds, Toyota would bolt the beds onto the frames, qualifying the trucks as having their final assembly completed in the United States. There were 15 other U.S. suppliers that produced truck beds for Toyota by 1972, and by 1974 Toyota took over Atlas Fabricators and renamed it Long Beach Fabricators, then later renamed to Toyota Motor Manufacturing USA, and finally it renamed the facility as Toyota Auto Body California since the facility didn't actually manufacture cars, it just fabricated truck beds.
Toyota Auto Body California is still in operation in Long Beach, California today, and it's the primary producer of parts for Toyota Tacomas as well as past-model service parts. It was Toyota's first manufacturing facility in North America, and it remains the company's longest-running North American plant. To read about even more titillating details of the plant's history, read Hagerty's article here.
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