Toyota executives say their company’s $13.9 billion battery factory employs 2,500 in Randolph County and can respond to whatever the market or the government’s regulation of the car industry throws at it.
Top officials from the Japanese automaker joined U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and N.C. Gov. Josh Stein at a ceremony on Wednesday.
The plant started shipping batteries in late May or early June, to assembly plants in Alabama and Kentucky that are building the Corolla Cross and Camry, said Don Sewart, president of Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina. About 95% of the workers are from North Carolina, with the balance coming from other Toyota plants.
It’s also shipped batteries to a factory in Canada that will build RAV4s and ship the completed vehicles back to the U.S., Stewart told reporters.
His comment came after the company’s formal announcement of the start of production.
Tetsuo “Ted” Ogawa, CEO of Toyota North America, called the launch “a giant step forward on our journey to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Stewart and other executives said the Liberty plant has four production lines for hybrid-car power modules fully up and running. Each is capable of supporting 150,000 new vehicles a year, for a total of 600,000 at full ramp-up.
Three other lines are in preparation and will eventually serve as many as 45,000 battery electric vehicles and 74,000 plug-in hybrids annually.
For those, the immediate task is “getting the process knowledge under our belt,” said Anne Souder, the Liberty plant’s general manager of manufacturing.
She added that “there’s a mix there” when it comes to producing batteries for BEVs and plug-ins. “We’re able to pivot between what the demand is,” she told reporters at a post-celebration roundtable.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the gathering that the Trump administration is about to lower the federal government’s current fuel-efficiency targets. “We’re going to bring down the price of vehicles because we don’t have standards that, frankly, you can’t meet,” he said.
David Christ, Toyota North America’s sales and marketing boss for the Toyota brand, stressed that the company’s long favored “a multi-pathway strategy” that incorporates all three of hybrids, plug-ins and EVs so it has offerings at multiple price points for multiple needs.
“Obviously, there was a big change in legislation that has materially changed what all the brands, all the OEMs, are chasing as far as EV volume,” Christ said.
“The good news in this facility is it’s not only building BEV batteries, it’s not only building PHEV batteries and it’s not only building hybrid batteries,” he said. “So regardless of where the legislation goes, we will have capacity here to help support wherever the compliance needs go.”
North Carolina has pledged more than $660 million in incentives for the Toyota plant, which is about 20 miles south of Greensboro. The money is tied to hitting job targets, including a goal of 4,500 jobs by 2035. Average pay must top $62,000, according to the state agreement.
Ogawa said that Toyota intends to invest another $10 billion in its U.S. operations, after a $60 billion capital expense over the years. It hasn’t said where that money will go, to Liberty or elsewhere.
Toyota had kept the start of deliveries from Liberty to its assembly plants under wraps. The announced goal was to begin in April, but spring came with no further word. As recently as Sept. 29, the TBMNC website said only that production would begin this year.
