Toyota held the ceremonial grand opening Wednesday for its only battery plant outside of Japan — a $14 billion array of mall-sized buildings spread across an 1,800-acre site in the tiny Randolph County town of Liberty.
The event drew some of the company’s top executives, as well as government officials from Japan and the United States, including U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Governor Josh Stein.
Toyota’s North American president and CEO Ted Ogawa pronounced the plant opening "a milestone in Toyota's American Journey."
"The launch of this plant marks a pivotal moment in the future of electrification for Toyota and for U.S. auto manufacturing," he said.
It also marks a startling turnaround for the area where Toyota built the plant. For decades, traditional North Carolina industries like furniture making and textile mills in Randolph County have been shutting down.
Now, a place where the county seat was declared "one of America's fastest dying towns" by Forbes magazine less than 20 years ago is home to the largest single investment in North America by the largest automaker in the world.
Stein said the future-focussed jobs Toyota is bringing are a huge win for the region and the state.
"This is super high-tech, these are the jobs of the future, and we are thrilled that Toyota invested nearly $15 billion here in North Carolina," he said.
“When a company of the scale and significance of Toyota plants a seed, a seed in the ground — $14 billion, it's going to eventually be 5,000 jobs — there's going to be all kinds of other businesses that come around to support this incredible operation," Stein said. "So Liberty, North Carolina, is going to be a place of immense opportunity, and we're excited about the future here."
Local officials say landing such an important plant for a company with a reputation like Toyota’s is the kind of endorsement that already has other companies even outside the auto industry considering locations there.
The plant now has four production lines in operation making cells for the batteries in standard hybrid vehicles.
Eventually, the company expects it to have 14 lines, with some also producing cells for plug-in type hybrids and all-electric vehicles.
Hybrids are in heavier demand than all-electric vehicles, at least for now.
Company officials emphasized that Toyota wants to produce the full range of different types of electrified vehicles that customers desire. They said the Liberty plant was designed to be flexible so as the market shifts among different kinds of vehicles, the mix of cells can change.
Toyota officials made two announcements during the ceremony. Ogawa said the company is planning another $10 billion in manufacturing investments in the United States, but didn’t offer details. And another company official announced it is donating $2.7 million to the Asheboro and Guilford County school systems.
It had made earlier donations to the schools.
Stein, who often touts the state's success in recruiting green energy companies, did so at the battery plant ceremony. Then he went from the Toyota ceremony in the morning directly to Charlotte, where he announced an electric vehicle company, Scout Motors, plans to invest more than $200 million to build its corporate headquarters in the city. That's expected to create about 1,200 new jobs.
