Workers in hard hats and vests roam across the factory floor, while others build assembly lines and man welding stations. Robotic arms whir through endurance tests. Piles of metal parts and cardboard boxes sit in loading bays, prepared to produce 500,000 rear axles each year for Toyota’s Sequoia, Tundra and Tacoma trucks.
Toyota’s newest San Antonio investment isn’t running full-throttle, but the electric hum of machinery and construction still blankets all 500,000 square feet of the new Southside factory.
The Japanese car manufacturer is installing equipment and hiring hundreds of workers before it starts commercial production.
“It is going to take us about two years to get through the whole project. We will be done with the building construction in May,” said Toyota Texas President Frank Voss. “We’re going to start to see salable product coming off at the end of this year.”
The car manufacturer has been in San Antonio for more than 20 years, and it opened its vehicle plant in 2006. It announced plans for a new factory in 2024 and broke ground later that year.
The new plant will produce rear axles — the part of the car that connects two wheels and transmits the torque that turns them. Toyota will keep roughly 40% of the axles it produces in San Antonio at its Tundra- and Sequoia-producing plant and ship 60% to Mexico for production of its Tacomas in Guanajuato and Baja California.
The rear axle plant will cost Toyota around $511 million and the company is in the midst of hiring 411 new workers for the facility.
The investment in local hiring was included in conditions for Bexar County and City of San Antonio tax incentives. Toyota got tax abatements from both local governments — estimated to have a combined value of roughly $30 million — if it made those investments by 2028.
There are three categories of available positions. Managerial roles have been filled; a majority are internal promotions and transfers, Voss said. Just over 50 of the new workers will be skilled maintenance staff, with a starting hourly wage of $35.90. Those workers have also all been hired.
Most of the new jobs, around 340, will be production positions. Toyota will hire those workers in groups over the next 16 months. Starting hourly salaries will be $22.50, exceeding a city requirement for a minimum hourly wage of $20.54.
Inside the factory
Those new production workers will spend their time between three sections in the new plant. Production moves from south to north through machining and welding, electrodeposition and assembly lines. After, rear axles are set aside for quality control and shipping.
Each welding station has one or two robots, where the mechanical arms whir around, welding together the axle’s long body piece with a series of brackets and other parts.
Personnel are trained in welding for inspection and maintenance of those robots. The machining process is very precise — surfaces of the rear axles are measured down to the micrometer, less than the width of a human hair.
The welding robots are being installed right now. On Monday, Toyota staff were conducting endurance training, running the robots for long periods of time to troubleshoot errors and issues.
The welding uses argon and carbon dioxide and large tanks that store those fuels are outside.
Sam Wegehaupt, a general manager at the new plant, said those materials were stored above lined, concrete basins to prevent any local contamination from leaks.
“Any time we have chemicals like that, we have very serious environmental standards,” Wegehaupt said.
After welding, the rear axle pieces are moved to a process called small parts electrodeposition. There, the parts go through a process similar to painting, said Greg Rexroat, the senior manager of production operations. After processing and painting, the axles are baked in an oven and then left to cool before they go to the final assembly stage.
Rexroat said workers will be trained to move between each station, so they can work on welding or electrodeposition as needed.
The final assembly lines are where the drive shaft and parts of the wheel are added on. Rexroat said there are 17 variations of the final rear axle. The different versions of the axle are built depending on customer needs, and workers can add four-wheel drive or off-road features to a truck.
Once the final part is assembled, Toyota personnel conduct quality checks and then send the parts out through large truck bays at the north end of the plant. Building the rear axles takes about three hours, though the parts often pause between stations for inventory and inspection.
International trade and Toyota production
While robotic arms spin through Toyota’s new plant, international trade politics are turning outside of it.
Voss, who oversees Toyota Texas and helps lead truck production in Texas and Mexico, said tariffs have not had a large effect on production schedules at the San Antonio vehicle facility, but the company is keeping an eye on the July review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that governs much of the trade between the countries.
That agreement could affect the rear axles, a majority of which are destined for Mexican factories.
Voss didn’t have any predictions for that deal, but he said the current USMCA, which was signed in 2020 and succeeded the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was a good framework to keep in place.
“Having some sort of consistency is very important for us and our suppliers,” Voss said.
It’s an issue San Antonio leaders are also looking at — Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones was one of several elected officials to tour the new plant. She’s called for low trade barriers as part of the USMCA review.
“When we can reduce barriers, we keep the costs low. There’ll be a higher demand for (goods) because of that cost, which means we’re employing more people,” Jones said.
