Pickup truck sales are doing much better than this time last year in just about every category, riding a tall and strong wave of production and product investment. Since Toyota produces both — its pickups — the midsize Tacoma and half-ton Tundra — at the same plant in San Antonio, it has a unique opportunity to increase production of both of its trucks with a single plant investment. To accomplish this, Toyota will add 275 people to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas assembly plant by the summer of 2016.
According to a spokesperson for Toyota, strong pickup truck demand is the reason it will add employees and invest $26 million to improve the production facility. That will allow Toyota to implement a new work schedule designed to add tens of thousands of new pickup trucks to its year-end totals.
After production of the Toyota Tacoma moved to the San Antonio plant in 2010, the plant was able to produce up to 200,000 vehicles per year without overtime or Saturday production. However, in the last two years the plant has produced around 230,000 pickups per year through overtime and some Saturday production. This new investment in people and plant upgrades, which will include a six-day work week (Monday through Saturday), should add somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 additional pickups per year to total capacity, putting the plant's potential maximum capacity close to 275,000 trucks.
At this stage, Toyota is not saying how it will split the extra units between the Tacoma and the Tundra but our guess is as more people get the chance to drive and see the 2016 Tacoma, dealerships will have trouble keeping the midsize-segment leader on the lots.
