With code name, how Toyota-Mazda set off secret race for 4,000-job plant

President Trump applauded Toyota and Mazda's plan to set up the joint venture in the USA and create up to 4,000 jobs. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda and Mazda CEO Masamichi Kogai celebrate a partnership between their companies to develop electric vehicles and self-driving cars and build a $1.6 billion U.S. plant. One of biggest potential job-creating bonanzas in the country, a giant new auto plant proposed by Toyota and Mazda, began in secret with a mysterious code name. Now it has become a full-blown race among states to try to reel in the $1.6-billion project that will create 4,000 good-paying direct jobs and thousands of other indirect jobs. The two Japanese automakers recently issued a blind request for proposals to states in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and South, according to two people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly because the process was confidential.