Video: 2021 How We Roll – The Journey of a SET Vehicle

Video Transcript

Casey Gunnell Jr., SET Group VP
Hey, JM Family. I’m Casey Gunnell Jr. and I work with all the great associates who make sure Toyota vehicles have a great journey from rail or boat to our dealerships where our customers purchase their new car. It all began in 1969 at the Tallyrand Port in Jacksonville, where we process and distributed vehicles for Toyota. Today, Tallyrand receives vehicles by boat from Japan, Turkey and Mexico. We also have additional inland processing centers located in Commerce, Georgia and in Jacksonville at our Westlake facility. These facilities receive vehicles by rail from six plants in North America. All three facilities process and ship vehicles directly to dealers in our five state footprint, which includes Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina. To see a day in the life of vehicle processing, let’s go to our brand new facility in Commerce, Georgia.

Matthew Fisher, Product and Processing Supervisor
Welcome to Commerce, Georgia. We’re here at Southeast Toyota at our brand new $106 million dollar Vehicle Processing Center. And this is where it all starts. Here at our railhead, which has four rail spurs capable of holding up to 60 rail cars. And this is where our business partner, Interrail, offloads the rail cars and gets them staged to go into production.

The second step in our process is to have each vehicle washed and then they’ll be brought into our accessory building, which offers one hundred ninety five thousand square feet of indoor conditioned air space for us to install accessories and perform the pre-delivery service.

After our accessories are installed, the vehicles come to our pre-delivery service department, where the vehicles get their final cleaning, all the function checks are performed and the vehicles are made ready for our dealer lot.

The final step in a vehicle’s journey through our processing center here in Commerce, Georgia, is for the vehicles to be picked up in our load lines and loaded onto our STS trucks where our drivers are going to deliver them to our dealership.

So now you have a better understanding of how Toyota vehicles are processed here at our Commerce facility and trucked out to our customers, the Southeast Toyota Dealers. Thank you for taking this time to visit with us at the crown jewel of Southeast Toyota, our new Commerce facility.