Toyota Material Handling Opens Columbus Electric Forklift Factory

Toyota Material Handling North America makes forklifts. On Aug. 5, 2026, the company opened a new factory on its Columbus, Indiana, campus for electric trucks sold under the Toyota and Raymond names. That is not a promise about every warehouse fleet. It is a factory opening with a dated product move.

The building is 295,000 square feet, the company said, which brings the Columbus campus to 1.9 million square feet. The campus already had more than 2,100 people on the payroll. The new factory adds 140 jobs, according to the same release. Toyota Material Handling North America put the investment at $100 million and called it the largest it has made to grow its manufacturing footprint. Construction started in June 2024. Production started in July 2026. The Aug. 5 event was the ribbon cutting, not the first day of output.

The first product on the line is an electric Class 1 stand-up counterbalanced forklift. Class 1, in ordinary warehouse language, is a sit-down or stand-up electric counterbalance truck used for dock and floor work. That model had been built at the company’s Greene, New York, plant. Moving it to Columbus frees Greene to concentrate on reach trucks, order pickers, and automation work, the company said. None of that means a buyer’s existing truck suddenly meets a new safety book. It means where that standup will be built.

Brett Wood, president and CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America, used the opening to restate the company’s view of the electric share of the North American lift-truck market. Those percentages are the company’s statements. This desk did not re-run the market survey.

This is not Toyota Motor’s San Antonio truck plant. It is the material-handling company that builds Toyota and Raymond industrial trucks. The photograph with this article is a U.S. Navy electric forklift in a hangar bay. It is a stand-in. It is not the Columbus factory and not the Class 1 standup named in the release.