With a little help from a 2015 TRD Pro Series Tundra and its plow, Toyota broke ground on its new $350 million headquarters in Plano, Texas.
Aside from the truck-assisted groundbreaking, the automaker also revealed a 10-foot-tall, 64-foot-wide “TOYOTA” installation during the ceremonies. Each letter held a Texan Yaupon Holly “wish tree,” all of which will be permanently planted once construction is completed. Local high school students were invited to tie handwritten wishes to the trees, as well; the notes will be placed in a time capsule to be buried on-site later on.
The new headquarters will be completed by early 2017 at the latest, and is located at the intersection of Headquarters Drive and Palomino Crossing. The groundbreaking marks the next phase in Toyota’s move to Texas from California, which began with the automaker’s announcement last year. Around 4,000 employees — half from California — are expected to call Texas home in the next couple of years.
Yaupon is a weed around my place. If it’s like our move from California to Texas, about 80% of those moved back. Too hot and missing family were the reasons.
Different varieties of yaupon holly are used extensively in commercial landscaping in North Texas. They’re a small evergreen tree or shrub. The female trees have red berries in the winter. They’re tough and require almost no maintenance, reducing landscaping costs for companies. Yaupon holly is a source of caffeine. Native Americans brewed a tea from Yaupon they called “the black drink”. They used to drink yaupon tea and then vomit before battle. The scientific name for yaupon holly is Ilex vomitoria.
Yes, it’s really a b***ch to be able to buy a nice family house for less than a million dollars. And to have a state budget that is balanced. And state services that are paid for. And reasonable in-state tuition at state universities.
What Texans experience is a little different than “80% move back”… we always say, “yes, they never stop complaining but they never leave either”.
I wonder when Elliott’s Hardware in Plano will start stocking the new extra-large spray bottle of “Californian-Be-Gone”… as seen on Oregon and Colorado T.V.
I’m with you, the costs of living in CA seem to outweigh the benefits.
This is how red states turn blue, and how places like Colorado got ruined.
Blue staters flee the People’s Republic of Massachusetts and Soviet Kalifornistan for freer places, but forget why they left their former homes. Then they start voting – for the same laws, taxes and social policies that drove them to move.
It’s like Russians escaping the former USSR and voting for the Gulag to be set up in their new home country.
Two generations later, America loses another formerly-free state to environmentalists, militant atheists, activist lawyers, Capital-T Trespassers, gun grabbers, the professionally offended, sexual deviants and all the other assorted rabble that make up the Army of Darkness.
How long until DFW becomes Frisco East?
Indeed. I just spent thirty years of my life watching that happen here in Oregon. Libtards are just a pack of savages that run from place to place.Once they are done raping it for personal gain, and bankrupt the state via their voting habits, (oh, that will never affect ME) they simply move on to the next one. I feel sorry for Plano. R.I.P
They don’t “Forget”…Liberals are just bratty little parasites wherever they go. They are mostly stupid Locust.
“Yes, it’s really a b***ch to be able to buy a nice family house for less than a million dollars. And to have a state budget that is balanced. And state services that are paid for. And reasonable in-state tuition at state universities.”
This may change. Oil prices are pinching the budgets of many petro-states, Texas included.
Texas is not as much of a petro-state as you think. That was the case before the first big oil patch crash in approx. ’85, but after that the economy diversified considerably. Prior to the Barnett Shale and fracking the state had plenty of money and a balanced budget every year. If the Barnett Shale and fracking go back away now that the Arabs are dumping oil to kill the US oil industry, Texas will be plenty OK. North Dakota, maybe not so much…
turf3, there is always some migration going on in America, but these days it seems to be a little more pronounced as people cash in on their property holdings in California, New York and New Jersey, and move elsewhere where it is cheaper to live and taxation is not as oppressive.
Lots of Californians and Easterners have chose the clean air and wide open spaces of New Mexico as their nirvana. Great for the real estate business. Maybe not so good for the people already here in NM.
While that is true, the recent oil boom is what made Texas’s economy look better in comparison.
Now, the drastic drop in the price of oil recently won’t hurt Texas as much as say, North Dakata, but there will be some belt-tightening and/or increased deficits.
turf3, it’s not just that the Texas economy is diversified, but the oil industry has both upstream operations that benefit from high oil prices and downstream operations, making stuff from oil, that benefit from low oil prices. If you’re one of many companies in Houston making chemicals, lubricants, plastics, etc. from oil, low oil prices mean higher profits.
The Barnett Shale West of Fort Worth primarily produces natural gas so the recent drop in oil prices isn’t that big a deal. I’d expect more pain in the Permian Basin of West Texas.
At the same time, Texas’s economy has been propped up by high oil prices and they lag behind in areas like healthcare and education.
This and MB’s move to Atlanta can largely be chalked up to corporate WELFARE – where the taxpayer gets bent but the wealthy keep getting wealthier.
bd2, the South has a Black underclass. The Southwest has a Latino underclass. Texas got stuck with both. However, if you live in a predominantly white area healthcare and education is indistinguishable from that in the Midwest.
Don’t let guys like Ol’ turf here fool you, Texas, especially the Dallas area is nothing at all like what guys like him try to portray it as. You see types like him on the internet, but truthfully you almost never run into guys like him. I have a house in North Dallas and am there every other month or so and most of the people in Plano and surrounding areas could not care less where you are from and don’t have any problem with anyone not from Texas. People are too busy decorating their big houses, driving their Lexus cars or SUVs or shiny new pickups that have never seen a day of work or shopping at any of the 50,000 great malls and restaurants around here.
The other thing is Ol’ Turf won’t tell you is the truth about the great state of Texas is that illegal immigrants run that state. The last time I was down there I was rear ended badly by an illegal immigrant at a stoplight. I called 911 and waited for the police to come. The fire department came and wanted me to just exchange info and I refused to move until the police came so they had to come. The police then told me that they are not required to make a police report of the incident and did not do so even though they were there. The woman had no insurance, no identification and she was given no ticket and her car was not impounded nor was she arrested. Amazingly she had insurance though, it was ghetto, but it was insurance. So she and others like her can go around all day bashing into people with little to no consequences. After a few days of trying to get in contact with her ghetto insurance I turned to mine Progressive which did an exceptional job handling the situation and getting my car fixed quickly, I can’t recommend them enough.
I had an extensive talk with the two officers about how messed up the illegal immigrant situation in Texas is and how tied their hands are with dealing with them so don’t buy that rah rah rah, Texas is perfect, don’t mess with Texas nonsense you see spouted from these guys all the time, it is a bunch of nonsense and false bravado. Dallas is already a traffic nightmare at times, going to be so much worse with Toyota coming there now.
If I were in charge of Toyota’s move and thought the comments from turf3 up to here were reflective of the “real Texas” I’d stop those Tundras TODAY and find a new location where the locals had actually started living outside their caves to set-up shop
No wonder many of Toyota’s employees are apprehensive about the move
I never said Dallas was a paradise.
It’s a big city in the Southwest. Of course there will be wrecks caused by illegals who run away across the nearest parking lot. It’s hotter than Hades. There’s crime, big city corruption, cruddy inner city schools, sprawling suburbs, and right wing politics.
On the plus side, people who actually work for a living can afford a nice house not a 2 bedroom shack for close to a million dollars or a two hour commute. There are other advantages like a state government that lives within its means (because it has to). (How’s that California state pension fund these days?)
I was pointing out that people who move to Dallas from elsewhere, especially from the upper Midwest and California, at least in my experience, never leave (so they are actually taking advantage of the advantages), but they also never stop complaining and telling you how much better it was where they came from. So, if it was so much better there, how come you’re here?
Although I do not currently live in Texas, I lived there for 44 years; my mother moved to Dallas in 1947; my father was born there and lived there his entire life. I don’t know how that level of experience compares to that of someone who “has a house in North Dallas and is there every month or so”…
The trucks with block lettering are gonna age better than the ones with the logo.
I do not see why the letter block grill is not already an option for the 2016 Tacoma, so old school and classy.
Plus it conjures images of heavy trucks from companies like Mack and MAN.
I never really understood the “bean wearin’ a sombrero” insignia. Bad on their cars, worse on the trucks.
If you look at it by individual pieces, it contains all the letters of their name. Pretty clever, IMO.
All right, I guess I’ll have to do it:
Congratulations to Toyota and the State of Texas on this important investment in the North American auto industry.
Amen!
“Investment in the North American auto industry”? Umm, it is not like they are just coming here, all they are doing is moving from one state in America to another, if anything they are contributing less to the North American economy because they are probably getting some nice fat tax incentives to do this deal.
The reality is that Toyota has the midsize and small car market in North America locked up pretty good to the tune of hundreds of thousands of units a year if not millions, so now they are going after the nice, fat profitable, high volume pickup truck market and where better to do that than Texas. I already see a ton of Toyota trucks in North Dallas/Southern Oklahoma region when I am at my house down there so this will only propel more sales. If they could even just double their pickup truck sales in N.America it would be a massive windfall for them. Ford sells something like 700,000 F-150s a year and Chevy like 500,000 Silverados alone, a 100,000 here or there from each of those guys would be mighty tasty.
$350 million, whether one-time or ongoing, is no trifling (or quibbling) matter.
I was going to say it’s more of an investment in the construction industry than in the automotive industry, but I guess that’s also just a quibble (i.e. true).
Venom, the primary reason Toyota is moving their headquarters from California to Plano, TX is to move employees closer to Toyota North American manufacturing in the Central and Eastern time zones. Easier to manage operations when people are at work at the same time. The California headquarters made sense when the American part of Toyota primarily imported cars from Japan, but today Toyota mostly builds cars here. The headquarters move suggests a commitment to North American manufacturing vs. importing cars from Asia.
Toyota is making a long-term effort to get into the US pickup truck market. It’s a slow learning process for them. I would guess that the Tundra will get better with so many decision makers relocated to a place where pickup trucks are very popular. However, Plano is more Lexus RX 350 than Toyota Tundra.
“… is located at the intersection of Headquarters Drive and Palomino Crossing”
Uh, I could not find this intersection in Google Maps. Is Palomino Crossing correct?
If they broke ground just now, is the road necessarily complete/named/mapped? Google isn’t instant.
If it helps, WFAA-TV says the site is just west of Legacy Drive near Texas 121, with JCPenney nestled inside a circular drive.
The Toyota site is on the West side of Legacy Dr. between TX-121 and Headquarters. Until recently that land had horses on it.
There ain’t no sanity clause. Compared to Southern California, some things are better, others worse.
PRO
1. Big increase in real disposable income – no state income tax, housing is a lot cheaper, and so are most other things you buy.
2. Traffic is better, and commutes are shorter.
3. Easy to fit in. Half your neighbors will be recent immigrants as well.
4. Good airline connections with occasional deals.
5. Texas is a debtors haven.
6. Texas has no alimony, only child support.
CON
1. Summers are hotter than Hell. Winters can get fairly cold.
2. No beach or mountains
3. Little in the way of weekend getaways by car.
4. You will tend to gradually lose contact (to some degree) with friends and relatives in California. It is a long way away.
I assume this will be good for Texas , more jobs to build the hq, new sub divisons … , the tax money would have been blown somewhere anyway, should help the collages w another big company to hire the grads, does anyone know if the calf employees will keep the same wages, that would be a huge windfall for them. I have been to Plano , not my cup of tea but I like tall trees and old houses and it seems Plano has very few of them, but you can not beat the cost of living compared to calf