At VW’s Mexico plant, the biggest car factory in North America still has room to grow

“I’d always had this idea of Mexico as a place of total disorder and chaos,” one of my colleagues was saying. But we were visiting a German car factory, the last place you’re going to find those qualities. As far as we could see, the Volkswagen facility just outside of Puebla, the largest car plant in the Americas and the second-largest VW facility in the world, was an international paragon of order, cleanliness, and organization.

And it may only get bigger — depending on whether VW chooses Tennessee or Mexico for its next big SUV.

Mexico has become the go-to spot for automakers wanting to build cars in the Western Hemisphere, offering easy shipping to many countries via free-trade deals. Last year, several automakers announced new plants or expansions in Mexico; the last new car factory built in the United States was VW's plant in Chattanooga in 2011.

Now VW must decide where to build a seven-passenger SUV in a couple of years, and to show off its manufacturing might, it brought a small and semi-reluctant group of journalists to Puebla on an AeroMexico charter plane from the Detroit auto show. The bullet points we were to optionally emphasize were as follows:

•This was the 50th anniversary of the factory.

•The Volkswagen Group would be investing $7 billion in North America by 2018.

•From here on in, the Golf, VW’s flagship car, would be manufactured in Puebla, with the first one rolling off the line last week.

•In addition, VW makes two versions of the Jetta at the factory, and also the Beetle and Beetle cabrio.

We spent a morning touring the facility. First, they took us to the building that houses their “Training Institute.” Here, hundreds of Mexican high-school students were working lathes or doing repetitive electronic tasks, and a few lucky ones were manipulating a robot arm. The Puebla plant has graduated nearly 5,000 kids from this institute, many of whom have gone on to work at the factory.

Every year, they get more than 1,000 applicants and accept 110. They choose, the school’s managing director, Sergio Mata Sanchez, told us, the students with the “greatest abilities in mathematics and physics.” Then they put them through a rigid curriculum that is “20 percent theory and 80 percent practice.”

The school has three precepts: Discipline, Order, and Cleanliness, of which the students have to display much if they want to survive the program. “It’s important for us to see how many cycles a person can go through in an eight-hour day,” the school director said. “And if they can’t cut it, they won’t be accepted into our plans.”