A 2015 Toyota Camry XLE sits on display in the visitors' center at Toyota's Georgetown production facility. Photo by Sarah Jane Sanders
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK) is getting up to speed on its most ambitious aesthetic redesign of the Camry the, best-selling passenger car in the United States for 12 years, while also getting ready to welcome a new member to the Georgetown family, the Lexus ES350.
“This time we stretched it a little bit more than we typically would,” TMMK President Wil James said of the mid-cycle revamping of the Camry, which saw almost everything on the car change.
“The Camry, generally as a family car, is considered to be kind of staid, but we really wanted to make it sportier and more exciting-looking this time, and I think we’ve done that,” James said.
Though not a full change of the sedan that last underwent a complete overhaul with the launching of a new generation for the 2012 model year, the Japanese automaker has trusted its oldest international production facility with its most drastic differentiation between trim levels in the car’s history.
“We expect this model to maybe surpass the volumes we’ve dealt with in the past, because it is a beautiful car and it is absolutely new,” James said. “Everything is new on it but the roof.”
The Camry nameplate sold 408,484 units in 2013, up 0.9 percent from 2012 while the closest rival in its class, the Honda Accord, sold 360,089 units, up a strong 12.2 percent from 2012.
“Every time we make a new vehicle, of course, we work real hard to make it state of the art and to provide the new opportunities and options that customers are looking for in them, and at the same time, try to design an exterior appearance of a vehicle that a customer is going to like and is not going to be dated,” James said.
New for 2015 is Camry’s first-ever luxury sports edition, the XSE — to go along with the XLE, the SE and the LE. While the SE, XLE and LE have differentiated themselves in years past with altered grills, the 2015 versions take it to a new level while showing their relation to the TMMK-produced Toyota flagship sedan, the Avalon, and the Lexus ES350.
“We’re learning what the Lexus customer wants right now going through this process so we can give them what they want,” said Mickey Payne, TMMK’s production assistant manager, who is helping lead the process of starting up the Lexus line in a new 235,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the Toyota manufacturing lines.
The Georgetown plant can, and usually does, produce a total of 2,000 Camry, Camry Hybrid, Avalon, Avalon Hybrid and Venzas each production day, for a total output of 500,000 vehicles per year on the two existing assembly lines. According to Payne, the Lexus production facility will have a completely different feel from its cousin next door.
Still in the midst of build out for equipment installation, the soon-to-be Lexus assembly line will have an output of 50,000 units per year when it is at full speed. The atmosphere on the Lexus line will be different too, as the noise level, speed and occasional feeling of being surrounded by machines on the floor of Toyota line will not convey to the Lexus facility. Neither will the conveyor belt, for that matter.
Payne said the Lexus ES350 will be built on pallets the crew calls “skillets” that will track from space to space along the assembly line. The cars will remain close to the floor during their production. The facility will also be quieter, as air-powered tools will be replaced by battery-powered devices in the hands of team members.
Payne and the teams that work on the Lexus line will have a different amount of time to do production tasks and different level of standards as they look to improve already razor-thin margins of error for Lexus, which are at a level that is half the acceptable margin from Toyota.
At top and bottom workers build Toyota Camrys, Avalons and Venzas on the two Toyota Motor Manu- facturing assembly lines in Georgetown. In the middle Pro- duction Assistant Manager Mickey Payne poses in the temporary training center for Lexus team members at TMMK's George- town campus.Photos by Sarah Jane Sanders
“It’s very similar,” TMMK Group Leader David Hardesty said of the way cars are built by Lexus. “The Toyota Production System is still the Toyota Production System, but it’s refined.”
Hardesty, who has reconfigured TMMK’s body welding area to accommodate Lexus production, has the distinction of welding the right quarter panel for the very first car to come off the TMMK line in 1988, which is now on display in the visitors’ center. He is now working on production system for the second make to be produced by TMMK within months of rolling its 10 millionth car off the line.
“To be part of that first car that’s actually sitting down there and then to go out and see what we do today — it makes you pretty proud knowing that you were a part of all that,” he said.
To ensure the Lexus line at TMMK is as fruitful for the company as the Toyota line has been, the new team is getting used to the higher standards of tasks as mundane as affixing warning stickers squarely, with a set of practice tables modeled after similar ones at Lexus’ Kyushu plant in southern Japan, which also produces the ES350.
The group that is already on hand for the Lexus production, which is expected to begin in August, has been training on 22 vehicles that have been brought over from Kyushu. Those cars line the floor in various states of assembly for training purposes. The group continues to grow as full teams begin on-site during November and the first trial assembly runs begin in February. Those cars built during trial and the 22 training vehicles will be decommissioned and not sold.
While the Lexus process is more involved, Payne said it’s far from foreign to him.
“Not so much different, just more detailed,” Payne said. “As close to perfection as we can get it. It’s still the Toyota Production System.”