Toyota Tundra will meet US sales targets

"We're on pace right now," Jim Lentz, executive vice president of Toyota's U.S. sales unit, said in an interview in Traverse City, at the auto industry's 2007 Management Briefing Seminars. "We're spending the incentives necessary, given the economics, given a down market, to sell that 200,000 vehicles."

Toyota, which doesn't disclose incentive spending by model, disputes Edmunds.com's estimate that it put $6,861 last month on each Tundra. Toyota sold 23,150 Tundras in July, a monthly record for the model.

Japan's largest automaker wants to establish the Tundra in the full-size pickup segment dominated by Ford Motor Co.'s F- Series, General Motors Corp.'s Silverado and Chrysler LLC's Ram. The push comes amid a 2007 U.S. sales decline of 4.9 percent in the category.

"The market is probably a little softer than we anticipated," Lentz said.

The Tundra incentives reflect how the large pickup market "is a different animal," Lentz said. Large-pickup owners often owe more on their trucks than they can get on a trade-in, he said, and "they need some type of incentives to make a transaction."

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