Corridor data
Reading the corridor in numbers
What follows is the corridor's evidence base, rebuilt from public record. The underlying figures are public and cited on each exhibit. The groupings, derived measures and reading of them are ours, and they do not always land where the original authors landed.
1 — Where assembly moved
Share of North American light-vehicle production, 2012 → 2022
The corridor went from 6.2% to 10.2% in a decade. The share it gained came mostly from Canada, which nearly halved — not from the Midwest, which slipped only modestly. The U.S. South grew over the same period, which tells you who the corridor is actually competing against: not the legacy Midwest, but the southern states running the same playbook.
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Source: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024.
2 — The supplier base
Supplier plants and employment across the five states, 2023
Texas has the most plants and nearly the smallest average plant. San Luis Potosí has among the fewest plants and by far the largest — around 850 people each. Texas runs small and specialised; northern Mexico runs large and labour-intensive. If you are sourcing Tier 2 capacity, that structural difference matters more than the headline counts.
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Source: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024. Per-plant figures derived by TXMX Automotive.
3 — Labour cost per unit of output
Nominal labour compensation per unit of industry output, USD, 2022
This measure is easy to misread. Texas at $0.32 sits well under the Midwest ($0.48) and the South ($0.50) — but that is output doing the work, not cheap labour. Northern Mexico at $0.01 is the opposite: a wage differential, not a productivity result. Read as one ranking they mislead. Texas is a productivity argument; northern Mexico is a labour-cost argument. The corridor's real advantage is holding both inside one supply chain.
Source: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024.
4 — The cell gap
Cells required each year against everything announced to date, GWh
Scenario — move the 2040 EV share
Implied cell demand if North America sells 23.4M light vehicles in 2040 at an average 88 kWh pack. Assumptions stated below.
Push the slider past about half and announced capacity stops being enough. That is a continental problem, not a corridor-specific one — which is precisely why it is an opportunity. Cell plants are sited on power, water and a very large parcel. They are not sited on incentive packages. Whether the corridor can answer those three questions determines whether it also gets the assembly work that follows.
Capacity and demand figures: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024. The scenario model — 88 kWh per vehicle, a 23.4M-unit 2040 market — is a deliberately simple construction by TXMX Automotive, not a projection from the source.
5 — The five recruitable project types
Capital range on a log scale, with our read on corridor fit. Select a row for detail.
Three orders of magnitude separate these. The cheapest — headquarters and software — depend least on physical infrastructure and bring exactly the high-skilled employment the corridor is shortest of. The most expensive depends most on what the corridor is currently weakest at. Recruitment priority should follow that dependency, not the size of the announcement.
Capital and employment ranges: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024. Fit ratings and commentary are TXMX Automotive's own assessment.
6 — The skills problem
The binding constraint is not land or power — it is who is available to hire
The high-skilled share of Texas motor-vehicle employment fell from 13.1% to 10.7% over a decade in which output rose. That arithmetic only works one way: most of the jobs added were not high-skilled ones. Programmer employment in the sector did more than double, from 4,000 to 9,800 — but the additional demand implied by 2040 is around 40,000, an order of magnitude away. Whether the corridor stays a place that builds things or becomes a place that designs them turns on this number and very little else.
Source: Bexar County / Macro Foresight, March 2024.
Sources & method
The numbers are public record. The reading of them is ours.
The base statistics on this page come from "Texas Mexico Automotive Supercluster: Progress, Prospects and Policies for Future Success", prepared by Macro Foresight for Bexar County and published in March 2024. We checked each figure against that document rather than against secondary coverage, and rebuilt them under our own groupings. Derived measures — per-plant employment, the scenario model — are our arithmetic and are labelled as such on each exhibit.
Statistics are not themselves copyrightable; the expression of them is. Every sentence, exhibit and conclusion on this site was written here. Where our reading departs from the source's, we say so rather than smoothing it over.