When the sun goes down, most San Antonio residents head for bed and turn out the lights.
Not so at Toyota’s Southside factory.
At 9 p.m. on Wednesday, automated vehicles and worker-driven trams were plying the concrete floors, carrying parts between the factory’s stations and playing music as they passed intersections and other vehicles. Factory lights bounced off the hulking truck frames that constantly move along the assembly line and the polished, yellow-painted railings that mark the facility’s different sections.
Nighttime is much the same as daytime there. Worker teams move between stations every two hours, shifting between two and four different jobs to maintain ergonomic safety. During breaks, they can use the gym. Lunch is around midnight.
“I don’t really see too much of a difference between night shift and day shift,” said Micki Arreola, a night shift worker who discussed her time on the job with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones during a recent tour.
Jones asked to see the plant at night and learn more about workers who spent time there during non-traditional working hours.
“I want to, for my own self, understand what are those unique challenges for somebody that’s working second shift, third shift,” she said during a State of the City event earlier that day.
Jones noted that child care, transportation and voting participation for those who don’t work a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift can be challenging, a concern which needs addressing.
Because office and administration staff work during the day, a majority of Toyota’s employees work during regular working hours, said President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas Frank Voss. Still, a large contingent of its 3,700 employees work night shifts. Voss said the car manufacturer’s suppliers, many of which have facilities on the South Side, have similar schedules to match Toyota’s production.
Jones continued to beat that drum Thursday when discussing budgets for early child care and workforce training.
“As they look to make sure they’ve got the widest pool of talent for that second shift, child care is something that they are focused on,” she said.
Toyota isn’t the only factory owner in San Antonio, either, other manufacturing employers are flocking to the South Side.
During the presentation to Jones, Toyota employees said the company had made a concerted effort to retain workers over the last three years. The Japanese car manufacturer launched mentorship and technical training programs that have helped stem post-pandemic retention issues.
Toyota’s retention rate in San Antonio dropped to 35% in 2023, but bounced back to 80% in 2024 and 2025 and was up to 85% this year. Those issues were felt across the manufacturing industry, company officials said, and resulted in a push to give workers more training, support and opportunities for feedback.
Over the next 15 months, Toyota is hiring around 340 workers for production positions. Starting hourly salaries will be $22.50, company officials said at a tour of its rear axle plant in March.
The welding dojo
One of the ways Toyota is augmenting its training is through a new, high-tech welding training the company implemented in spring 2025.
Most of the welding at Toyota’s 2.2-million-square-foot truck manufacturing plant and its under-construction rear axle facility is done by robotic arms that are taller than a person, but workers still need to be able to identify and fix mistakes as parts pass along the production line.
That’s why the company has a three-week training program to teach workers how to identify and repair welding issues.
The “welding dojo,” as it’s known by Toyota Texas employees, has taken a central role in training workers for the company’s new rear axle plant. That facility won’t start production until May, but 40 workers have already gone through Toyota’s training.
Toyota Texas sent its three welding teachers, Ruben Reyes, Jesus Rodriguez and Ramey Rafati to plants across the U.S. and in Japan to refine their skills and bring back the best practices for training.
Their course takes trainees through welding basics, teaching them thick-plate and metal inert gas, or MIG welding. Trainees are given fundamental knowledge and trained to identify defects.
Then, after a day or two of classroom work, they move onto the next stage.
“With this system, we have a welding helmet, we have a MIG [welding] gun,” Rafati said.
But the helmet and the gun are not live — they’re hooked up to an augmented reality program that evaluates welders’ angles, distance from a metal plate and proper welding speed without actually sending any heat or sparks.
Their welds are evaluated on a 100-point scale and workers must score a 95 to pass. If Jones’ experience is any indication, the software does educate its users. The mayor tried twice, boosting her welding score from an 85 on the first go to a 93.
There’s plenty more to the welding training, though, and Toyota trains its workers using real welding materials and a microscope so they can inspect their work and their efforts for inconsistencies and flaws.
After moving from virtual welding to the hands-on, real deal, trainees’ final task is to weld a car part and dunk it in a bucket of water. They don’t pass until the part is leak-free.
