Toyota’s New Texas Truck Factory: A New Plant for a New Truck

We’re pretty sure that most of you know by now that Toyota has built a new factory just outside San Antonio in which to assemble the Tundra half-ton pickup.
But what you may not know is just how interesting this factory is. So check this out:
This new plant is built on the 2,000-acre site of the former Walsh-Small Ranch, said to be the oldest cattle ranch in Texas, one that was active even before Texas statehood in 1845.
The new plant, called Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Texas, Inc., or TMMTX, was built to create up to 150,000 new Tundras each year with its crew of 2,000 team members. It augments an existing plant in Indiana, in operation since 1999, which also assembles Tundras.
San Antonio was chosen because the area around the city has plenty of flat, open ground, and because it also has a confluence of transportation facilities – both rail and highway. We need to be able to transport in raw materials, as well as transport out the finished Tundras.
But why Texas in the first place? That’s an easy one. Texas was chosen because it’s the capital of pickup sales in the United States – in fact, roughly one of every seven pickups sold in the U.S. is sold in Texas.
And also because San Antonio, the eighth largest city in the U.S., was seen as a repository of qualified workers. Indeed, http://www.fivestartoyota.com/ received more than 100,000 applications for the plant’s 2,000 jobs.
Toyota acquired the property in 2003 and broke ground in October of that year, moving 6.5 million cubic yards of dirt, pouring 250,000 yards of concrete (enough to pave a two-lane highway 53 miles long), erecting 15,000 tons of steel and installing 10 acres of siding.
At a total cost of $1.28 billion, the result is 2.2 million square feet, or 46 acres, of main factory built to create the Tundra at a rate of about 750 per day, starting from coils of steel rolling into one end of the building and ending with gleaming trucks rolling out the other.
In the stamping, welding and painting areas of the plant, about 400 robots do about 90 percent of the work, with the rest done by humans.
Humans also do most of the vehicle assembly – today’s robots are smart, but not smart enough to be certain that parts and components fit together properly.
Using this creative combination of brain power, muscle and machine, it takes about 24 hours to complete a truck – that’s going from raw steel to finished, painted, rolling and running state-of-the-art pickup.
Each truck comes down the line as a bare chassis, after the frame has been manufactured and its suspension, tires and wheels attached, and has a manifest, a sheet of paper, hanging from it, that shows what type of parts the truck needs. It’s kind of a recipe for what the truck will be.
This requires a very sophisticated parts-delivery system to make sure the right parts get to the line to match the vehicles. So in a process called “sequential build,” the seat-building company, for instance, completes its seats in exactly the right order, and it delivers those seats in exactly that order. The finished seats are loaded onto the assembly line in the proper order and installed in the truck they were meant for.
Our 21 on-site suppliers who provide parts, components and accessories are on-site, and they work in exactly this same way. They work in an additional 1.8 million square feet constructed to house their operations and the additional 2,100 workers who will be employed by them.
Tundra engines are produced in a Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Huntsville, Alabama, and transmissions are produced by a supplier in North Carolina. All are shipped to the Texas and Indiana facilities and installed there.
While some parts from Japan are being used on the new Tundra, 75% percent of the truck’s content is domestic.
As proud as Toyota is of this new state-of-the-art facility, it’s equally proud of the fact that the plant is a model citizen in environmental terms.
For instance, because much of the environmental impact in an automobile manufacturing facility comes from the painting operation, the Texas plant uses a water-borne paint system, with a water-borne primer. Without a solvent-based paint, emissions are much lower than they otherwise would be.
Water is an important consideration in an arid region such as this area of Texas, where most of the water supply comes from the area’s aquifers. The plant is built to minimize water use by utilizing recycled water in its processes.
The San Antonio plant operates as what’s called a zero-landfill facility. What this means is that no waste is being taken to a landfill. Instead, the plant will recycle extensively. For instance, scrap steel will return to the steel mill, scrap plastic will be shredded and returned to plastic pellet manufacturer.
Even the pallets upon which parts are delivered are plastic, rather than wood. That’s because wood breaks up and wears out, then must be disposed of in a landfill. Plastic can be used again and again.
The result, then, is not only a factory to match the Tundra, but a factory to match the economic and environmental needs of Texas, and of San Antonio. It’s a great way to go about assembling a vehicle. Especially when it is headed to http://www.fivestartoyota.com/

Diabolical Diesel Dually Tundra: Part 'Mad Max,' Part Rolls Royce

Though I’ve written a lot about trucks, especially in the two years leading up to the launch of the all-new Tundra, I’ll readily admit that I’m not a truck guy. Now, they sure do come in handy when you’ve got a ton of stuff to move, or some oversized item that needs to get from here to there. But my day-to-day reality is blissfully truck-free and, in all likelihood, always will be.
The same cannot be said for Warren Victor, one of my colleagues here at Toyota Motor Sales. Warren works in the Truck and SUV Marketing Group. He doesn’t just think about trucks or, even, drive them. He actually dreams about them. And, sometimes, he gets to bring those dreams to life.
A massive case in point: the Tundra project truck he's rolling into Toyota’s booth at the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association show in Las Vegas Oct. 30-Nov. 2. Warren directed the Toyota Motorsports Technical Group to take a stock Tundra and find a way to shoehorn into it an 8-liter, inline 6-cylinder engine made by Toyota affiliate Hino Motors. They succeeded, but it required radical alterations to pull it off. You see, this is the same engine that’s meant for a 35,000-pound commercial truck, generating enough torque so that, as Warren puts it, the Tundra could climb a wall if requested.
Among the exterior cues befitting this behemoth’s off-the-charts muscle are 22.5-inch wheels custom made by Alcoa, a diamond plate-lined bed and a charcoal gray metallic flat paint treatment. Inside, the truck features hand-sewn chestnut-squash-colored leather seats and suede pillars and headliner.Warren’s one line description: “It’s ‘Road Warrior’ on the outside and Lexus on the inside.”
Given www.fivestartoyota.com version of this one-off will never see the light of day, what’s the point? Warren says it’s all about a willingness to set aside convention and try new things—something a company the size of Toyota should do from time to time.
And along the way, who knows? It might even tempt a lifelong car guy like me to appreciate the beauty, and the beast, in trucks.

Doing the Alcan Highway on Hydrogen: A High-Tech Drive Through a Low-Tech Wilderness

Doing the Alcan Highway on Hydrogen: A High-Tech Drive Through a Low-Tech Wilderness
Toyota gets a lot of attention because of the vehicles we build and sell that are powered by a system we call Hybrid Synergy Drive. The best-known of these is of course the Prius. There are others, as well.
But the most familiar form of Hybrid Synergy Drive, which combines the virtues of an efficient gas engine with those of a battery pack and a powerful electric motor to deliver improved fuel economy and reduced exhaust emissions, is just one component of what we’re doing in our search for what we call sustainable mobility.
Among other things, as part of our Hybrid Synergy family of vehicles, we’re exploring hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. These rely on the reaction between oxygen and hydrogen, in a complex system called a fuel-cell stack that replaces the internal-combustion engine, to create electricity that is used to power the vehicle and all its systems. The only by-product is pure water. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But though hydrogen-vehicle technology is well advanced, the vehicles themselves are still a long way from consumer driveways, not least because of the lack of an infrastructure to manufacture, store and deliver the hydrogen needed to power them.

Indeed, roadside refueling of hydrogen vehicles at the gas-pressure levels that the vehicles need isn’t even legal in some places. But it is in Canada. That made Canada’s famed Alcan Highway a dandy place for us to demonstrate the capabilities of our experimental Highlander FCHV.
So we set up a trip down the Alcan, and we planned for 300 miles between fuel stops. We felt that this distance was a good one because it’s well within our FCHV’s range, and because it’s a typical and acceptable range for a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle. It seemed a good standard against which to measure the usability and practicality of the Highlander FCHV.
Additionally, this seemed a valuable opportunity to test the vehicle’s power system against some of the challenges associated with fuel-cell power trains. These include starting and operating in cold temperatures, and standing up to the vibration and harshness of rough roads over a long distance, and over a long time.
You know about the Alcan Highway, right? It comprises more than 1,500 miles of roadway that was carved through the Canadian wilderness, from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to a point about 300 miles short of Fairbanks, Alaska, through the rugged Yukon Territory, in 1942.

The road itself is mostly paved, but it’s rough, with frost heaves, potholes and worse. In addition to vehicular traffic, it’s also got moose, grizzly bears and other animals vying for the right-of-way. We’re always up for a challenge and a bit of adventure, so this trip sounded just right to our intrepid Torrance-based Advanced Technologies Group team.
Our plan was to travel the 2,300-mile distance from Fairbanks to Vancouver, British Columbia, covering much of the distance over the Alcan, in seven days – and to do it without practice runs or pre-trip evaluations. Call it Alcan-plus. If we made it to Vancouver, great. If not – well, we’d just chalk the whole experience up to research and development. Except for some trip-specific graphics and tubular guards for the grille, rockers and rear end, the Highlander FCHV was left in its standard prototype form.
We enlisted the aid of Linde AG, which provided a supply of hydrogen that was carried with us on a truck, and Powertech Labs, which supplied a self-contained refueling rig that came along on another truck. Both trucks traveled ahead of us and set up shop at predetermined intervals so we could refuel according to plan. And, just in case, a pair of Tundra pickups followed along behind as support vehicles.
As we made our way toward Vancouver, we covered the most remote sections of the Yukon Territory. We encountered very cold weather, very rough roads, and herds of elk, goats, caribou and buffalo. We crawled past those animals at very low speeds, and, on open stretches of road, sailed along at more than 90 m.p.h.
When we reached our destination seven days after setting out, we tallied up everything that had gone wrong with our vehicle and found that our list contained – well, absolutely nothing at all. Our Highlander FCHV performed without a glitch - just as we suspected it would.
So what did the trip prove? Well, for starters, it proved that our FCHV works really well. It underscored the viability of hydrogen as a fuel. And it proved to us that if, and when, hydrogen finally becomes widely available to consumers, Toyota will have the technology to make reliable, clean-running, affordable vehicles available. That’s part of our commitment to sustainable mobility. And it’s part of our commitment to our http://www.fivestartoyota.com/

More Than A Compact Truck?

I’m guessing that many of you Open Roadies have only seen the small bit of the A-BAT, a concept vehicle we debuted at the North American International Automobile Show in Detroit in January, and introduced to you in our first post about the vehicle, titled "Spotlight on Detroit: A-BAT Comes to Town," on January 15. We also showed the vehicle at the Chicago Auto Show, and now that the excitement has died down a bit, we thought we’d describe it in a bit more detail and seek your opinions about it.
The A-BAT – or Advanced-Breakthrough Aerodynamic Truck – is a highly flexible four-passenger compact truck that uses a unitized body, instead of the separate cab, cargo bed and steel ladder frame more usually seen in trucks of all sizes.
The A-BAT’s flexibility goes far beyond its unitized construction, however. First of all, it’s designed to be at home on dirt roads, city streets and Interstate highways. And more important, its motive power is provided by Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive. That’s right, it’s a hybrid, so it’s got the low emissions and high fuel economy we all want.
In fully enclosed form, the A-BAT’s cargo bed is just 4 feet long – enough space for a whole lot of camping or sports gear. But dropping a midgate at the rear of the passenger cabin and folding out a bed extender provides the capacity required to haul that familiar benchmark of pickup-truck capacity, the 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. And a translucent roof panel slides open to allow for tall, bulky cargo in the cargo bed.
The bed has additional features that are further aimed at expanding the A-BAT’s usefulness. These include tailgate lighting for illuminating the load in the bed, a first-aid kit and flashlight integrated into the tailgate, sliding tie-downs and an AC power outlet. Storage for sports and leisure equipment is provided in the lockable drawers in the bed walls, and additional storage is accessible through sliding doors conveniently placed in and outside of the truck bed. And if that isn’t enough, even more storage capacity is found in a large sliding drawer beneath the bed, accessible without opening the tailgate.
Taking the concept of environmental efficiency a bit beyond the use of Hybrid Synergy Drive, the A-BAT has translucent solar panels in the top surface of its instrument panel. These capture sunlight and convert it into energy that helps power the retractable, portable navigation unit, portable power pack and backlit information displays found in the A-BAT’s interior.
That interior’s alloy center console houses a portable power pack that provides both AC and DC electrical power for powering tools, electrical gear while camping, a laptop computer, small appliances or assisting a vehicle jump-start.
So at a time when our pickups have gotten larger, what we have here is nothing less than the reinvention of the compact pickup. It’s cool looking, practical, useful, fun to drive and, best of all, it’s a hybrid.
The question that most frequently arises, of course, is this one: Is the A-BAT slated for production? Well, Toyota never comments on advance product. And that brings me to the most important part of this post. Using the comment area you’ll find below this post, tell us what you think of the A-BAT. Should we build it, or not? And if we do build it, what features should we keep, what features should we add, and what should we do differently?
We’re really interested in knowing what http://www.fivestartoyota.com/ thinks.

A Win and a Top-5 Finish

You may have heard that a Toyota won its first NASCAR Sprint Cup points race this week when Kyle Busch wheeled his Camry to victory at the Atlanta Motor Speedway.
That’s good stuff, and we’re thrilled about it. But we’re equally thrilled by a vote of confidence we received from an unexpected source recently – kind of an "attaboy" from the business community. We were ranked fifth in Fortune’s list of the top 20 most admired companies.
Actually, it was even better than that. We were the top-ranked automotive company. Just one other automotive company was included in the top-20 list, but it failed to crack the top 10.
This ranking is a pleasant piece of news because unlike the typical awards given cars and trucks, this ranking takes more into consideration than just the great hardware we produce.
It’s based on qualities that have everything to do with the way in which we produce that hardware. It’s based on business culture.
To arrive at what the folks at Fortune call "www.fivestartoyota.com," they employ a research firm to sort companies by industry and select the 10 largest in each industry. Then, executives, directors and analysts are asked to rate the companies in their own industries, and to mark each company with a score of from zero, for poor performance, to 10, for excellent performance. More than 3,300 responders provided rankings based on the following eight attributes: quality of management; quality of products and services; innovation; long-term investment value; financial soundness; people management: the ability to attract, develop and keep talented people; social responsibility and use of corporate assets.
And we were ranked fifth overall. We’re grateful for the recognition, and pleased to find ourselves in such interesting company, including the likes of Apple, Starbucks and Google.
So a win and a top-five ranking, right there with companies whose products many of us rely on every day. All we can hope for are a few more wins, and, maybe an even higher ranking next year.

When "Worst" Really is "Best"

One of the most interesting elements of the Internet involves people making hay from other folk’s original material – reporters reporting on reporters, in other words.
Just such a piece has attracted our attention. It’s titled, "11 worst cars - Consumer Reports." And its subhead entices readers with, "Here are the cars and SUVs with the lowest scores in Consumer Reports' annual auto tests."
OK, so far, so good. But this piece appeared on CnnMoney.com, rather than on any site affiliated with Consumer Reports, and since it appeared there, has appeared on several other Web sites. Wherever it appears, it is, in our view, not only a serious distortion of the information published in the April issue Consumer Reports, which contains the magazine’s annual car ratings, but also is a serious disservice to readers everywhere.
The list names the Toyota Yaris and the FJ Cruiser as members of this ignominious list of 11 Worst Cars. But interestingly, neither the Yaris nor the FJ Cruiser is anywhere to be found on Consumer Reports’ "Worst-of-the-Worst" list, also published in the April issue. Rather, it’s a figment of the author’s imagination, the result of the story’s author reading and interpreting Consumer Reports’ material and extrapolating that for himself.
In reference to the Yaris, the piece notes that "The Yaris is the smallest and least expensive car Toyota sells in the United States. It actually ranks at the top of the list in both reliability and low cost of ownership, but those factors are not included in Consumer Reports' basic vehicle score."
It criticizes the Yaris’ acceleration without acknowledging that small engines are, with light weight and efficient aerodynamics, part of the equation for good fuel economy, which the Yaris delivers. Its EPA rating, in fact, is 29 city and 36 highway with its standard 5-speed transmission.
In fact, surveys rate the Yaris the most reliable vehicle in its class, and Yaris also scores at the top of its class for its low ownership cost. So we wonder how it is fair, or appropriate, to categorize Yaris as one of the "11 worst." Clearly, that’s not the case.
CnnMoney.com also took aim at the popular FJ Cruiser, criticizing the FJ for its ride, handling and access, among other things, even as it congratulated it for its off-highway prowess, its excellent powertrain and for its reliability scores.
At the risk of stating the obvious, we’re compelled to remind the folks at CnnMoney.com, and elsewhere, that the FJ Cruiser is aimed at a niche market of serious off-road aficionados who are looking for a vehicle that is an off-highway athlete. The attributes that make off-highway performance possible include a stiffer suspension and a bit of ground clearance, two factors which might compromise a limo-like ride and sportscar-like handling and access.
Obviously, the FJ Cruiser is not for everyone. We have five other SUVs for our more mainstream customers. We could understand if CnnMoney.com criticized the FJ Cruiser for not having certain levels of refinement. But it’s hard to fathom criticism of a vehicle for being good at the job it was designed to do, for meeting the needs of its intended buyers.
Surveys rate the FJ Cruiser well above average in reliability. As with CnnMoney.com’s take on the Yaris, listing the FJ Cruiser among the "11 worst" vehicles in Consumer Reports is a serious misuse of the magazine's data.
We’re left with the view that CnnMoney.com’s "11 worst" write-up is serious misrepresentation of our vehicles as evaluated by Consumer Reports. It takes some ratings out of context and does not convey the full picture of our vehicles. And that’s a shame. We’d hoped for better from the folks at www.fivestartoyota.com.

Diesel Power Vs. Hybrid Synergy Drive: A Tie? Not Really.

There’s been a bit of Interweb buzz lately about a comparison done by London’s Sunday Times between a Toyota Prius and a diesel-powered BMW 5-Series sedan.
www.fivestartoyota.com driven from London to Geneva, covering a total of about 545 miles - doubtless a fairly interesting jaunt. About 100 of those miles were urban miles where the Prius could operate in an optimal environment, and about 445 of them were suburban miles where the BMW would have the advantage.
Over this distance the Prius averaged 48.1 mpg while the BMW diesel averaged 50.3 mpg.
We hear you Prius skeptics saying, "Ahah!" Yes, the Bimmer bested the Prius by a whole 2.2 mpg.
But that’s not all there is to the story. The Times story, which you can see by clicking here, listed not only the cost of fuel for both cars, but the cost of the vehicles themselves, including their respective road-tax bills. And it is when pondering these numbers that we gain critical perspective.
In traveling from London to Geneva, the BMW’s diesel fuel bill was ₤54.19, while the bill for the Prius’s Unleaded gas was ₤54.64. At today’s rate of exchange between the dollar and the pound of about two to one, that’s $108 spent on diesel fuel and $109 spent on Unleaded.
So, OK, a difference of a buck? Call that a draw.
But this is a tie that’s easy to break. List price for that BMW 5-Series diesel in Britain is ₤27,190, and that doesn’t include a road tax of ₤115.
List in Britain for the Prius is ₤20,677. Road tax for the Prius is just ₤15.
Beyond costs, the Times failed to address the vastly superior performance of the Prius on emissions other than CO2 – you know, those things like particulates and oxides of nitrogen that cause human health issues. Here the Prius shines, with a quarter the particulate level and less than a 10th the NOx of the BMW. We believe that these lower levels are important.
So maybe we’re missing something here, but it looks to us as though, when all costs are considered, the Prius is markedly less expensive to own and operate, about even on CO2 and fuel costs, and markedly cleaner on other tailpipe emissions. We can’t really say that we’re surprised.