Buffalo is a small town in Putnam County, set on a bench above the Kanawha River about twenty-five miles west of Charleston. The TMMWV site sits on the floodplain, a rectangular industrial campus visible from the air for miles - acres of bright roofs, parking lots, rail spurs, and trucking lanes. Toyota broke ground on the original plant in 1996 and started production in 1998, initially building four-speed and five-speed automatic transmissions for North American vehicles. The choice of West Virginia surprised some observers at the time. Toyota had already invested heavily in Kentucky and was looking south. The West Virginia site offered river and rail access, a willing workforce, and aggressive incentives from state and local government. The plant has expanded several times since opening, with engine production added in 2004.

TMMWV does not build cars; it builds the machinery inside them. The current engine lineup includes the 2.4 liter T24A turbocharged inline-four, which started production in 2022 and goes into the latest Crown and Lexus NX models, and the 2.5 liter A25A inline-four that powers the Camry, RAV4, Highlander, and Lexus ES. Older engines built here included the 1.8 liter 2ZR-FE four (which made it into millions of Corollas), the 3.5 liter 2GR-FE and 2GR-FKS V6 family that powered the Camry, Avalon, RAV4, and Highlander, and the original 1.8 liter 1ZZ-FE that ran the 2004-2008 Corolla. On the transmission side, the plant builds the UA80 eight-speed automatic, the UA660 six-speed automatic, and the eCVT transaxle for Toyota's hybrid drivetrains - the gearbox at the heart of every Camry Hybrid, RAV4 Hybrid, and Prius. The hybrid eCVT line opened in 2018 and has scaled as Toyota's hybrid sales have surged.

In February 2021, Toyota announced a $210 million investment to expand engine production at Buffalo, adding capacity for an additional 70,000 engines per year and creating about a hundred new jobs. The expansion was framed by the company as a response to growing demand for the A25A and the new T24A turbo engines, both of which power Toyota's mainstream North American product. The announcement was the kind of milestone state economic development officials build entire careers around: a major employer reinvesting rather than relocating, choosing to grow capacity at an existing site rather than greenfield somewhere else. The plant currently employs around 2,000 workers and has a cumulative investment in excess of $2.4 billion. Engines and transmissions made here flow north to Georgetown, Kentucky for Camry assembly, west to Indiana for Highlander and Sequoia, south to Texas for Tacoma and Tundra, and to Toyota's assembly partner plants in Mississippi and Mexico.

The TMMWV plant sits in a state whose economic story has been dominated for more than a century by coal. The decline of coal employment over the past three decades has been a defining political and social issue for West Virginia, and the question of what kind of work follows it remains unanswered for many counties. TMMWV does not solve that question by itself, but it is one of the most visible counterexamples to the narrative that West Virginia has no future outside extraction. The plant builds modern, complex machinery to international quality standards in a town of less than 1,500 people. The work is union-eligible but the plant is non-union; the wages are good by local standards. Toyota's choice to stay and expand, even as the auto industry pivots toward electric vehicles - a transition that puts internal combustion engine and transmission plants on uncertain ground - is a vote of confidence in this particular bend of the Kanawha River.