Did you know that the Production Engineering (PE) team members who work at the Toyota Production Engineering and Manufacturing Center (PEMC) in Georgetown, Kentucky, don’t design Toyota and Lexus vehicles?
They also don’t assemble them. Instead, PE serves as the bridge between those two core functions — designing and building the assembly lines, machines and plants that make it all possible.
Check out more fun facts about PE and the PEMC:
Heart of the Org – PE falls under the Manufacturing pillar. It works closely with Manufacturing Operations and the new Manufacturing Business Operations Group that was created in 2025.
Five in One – PE is comprised of five divisions: Battery Manufacturing Engineering; Environmental Facilities Engineering; Unit and Core Engineering; Engineering Excellence and Strategy; and Vehicle Manufacturing Engineering.
Center of This Universe – The vast majority of PE’s 1,274 team members work at the PEMC. However, there are also some PE team members stationed at all 14 of Toyota’s manufacturing sites across North America.
Solar Powered – Built in 2017, the PEMC features state-of-the-art sustainability features, including solar panels on the roof of the building. This 528,000-kilowatt installation generates about 26% of its daily energy needs. That’s enough energy to power 50 typical households for a whole year. (Source: PEMC Environmental Sustainability Tour)
It Adds Up – The PEMC is home to PE’s Additive Lab where team members are pushing the envelope on printing technologies to create jigs, fixtures, prototypes and production-ready parts for manufacturing.
Field Trip – The PEMC also serves as the base of operations for the Customer Quality for Production Engineering (CQPE) group. It serves as the link between PE and the field, collecting and analyzing field data to improve equipment/process design, yokoten best practices across the plants and systemic recurrence prevention.
Kaizen Driven – In addition to new model introductions, PE is also responsible for lifecycle management. The team supports manufacturing kaizens, tackles major facility refurbishments, and looks to combine new and existing technology to improve our vehicles, manufacturing processes and engineering methods.
Fully Plugged In – The latest addition to the PE organization is the Battery Cell team. These engineers are trained on the entire process of making lithium-ion battery cells from the initial stage of mixing the raw chemical materials to the final stage of assembling the battery cells. These batteries are helping to fuel Toyota’s North American hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles.
Originally published March 19, 2026