Where Is The Largest Toyota Factory In The World And How Big Is It?
In the decades since Toyota released its very first car in 1936 — the Model AA sedan – it has become one of the true titans of the modern auto landscape. One can only imagine that the company has grown beyond anything the designers of the Model AA might’ve foreseen when that car hit the streets of Japan. — even the most optimistic of business projections conjured by company bosses in the 1930s couldn’t have anticipated just how popular the Toyota brand would become in America.
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Yet here we are, with Toyota ranking among the best-selling brands not only in the U.S., but in markets spanning all corners of the globe. Concurrently, Toyota also ranks among the top manufacturers in the world, with the company aspiring to produce more than 10 million automobiles in 2024 alone. Whether you realize it or not, a significant portion of the Japanese company’s vehicle and engine production actually occurs outside of its native lands. Perhaps more surprising than that fact is that the largest Toyota auto production facility in the world is actually located in the United States.
More specifically, it is located in Georgetown, Kentucky. The manufacturing plant broke ground in 1986 and began running vehicles off the production line just two years later. The Japanese automaker has kept the vehicles pumping out of that plant in the decades since, and given how popular Toyota’s are stateside, that’s not likely to change anytime in the near future.
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Toyota’s Kentucky plant is truly massive
As it is, Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky production facility — which cost the wholly Japanese owned outfit a reported $800 million to build — opened just three decades after the company began selling its cars in America. The facility opened as Toyota’s were experiencing a U.S. sales spike, with Americans enjoying the benefits of driving reliable, fuel-efficient builds like the Celica and Camry. Not surprisingly, the latter vehicle was indeed the first to be manufactured in the Kentucky plant, with the first American-made Camry rolling off the line in 1988.
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Toyota has kept the pedal to the production metal in Kentucky over the years, with the company boasting that, as of 2024, that more than 14 million vehicles had origins there. Toyota is still making Camry’s there too, with the company crossing the 10 million vehicle mark on that best-selling model in 2021. That staggering output is, perhaps, to be expected for a production house as large as the one Georgetown, Kentucky, which currently stands at a truly massive 9,000 square feet spread out over 1,300 acres of land.
You’d be correct in assuming that such a facility requires an equally massive workforce, with Toyota noting that its Kentucky plant employed more than 9,400 individuals in 2024. In that calendar year alone, those employees were able to produce 435,631 vehicles, as well as 714,400 engines. Apart from the Camry and its Hybrid variant, Toyota also produces the Rav4 compact SUV in Kentucky. As Toyota currently claims Lexus among its holdings, the company also manufactures that brand’s popular ES and 300h models there as well.
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