Toyota to produce US batteries from April

The 7mn ft² gigafactory being developed by Japan’s Toyota in Liberty, NC will produce and ship its first batteries in April, the firm has announced. It is committed to investing almost $14bn into Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina (TBMNC), its first in-house battery manufacturing plant outside Japan.

The plant will boast 14 battery productions lines, four for HEVs and 10 for PHEVs and BEVs. But the firm has been coy over offering a capacity figure for the facility.

One beneficiary of TBMNC production should be Toyota’s new all-electric three-row SUV that it is developing in Kentucky and has a 2025 planned launch date. The firm is also working on a separate three-row e-SUV in Indiana. Longer-term, Toyota plans to roll out 30 new BEV models by 2030.

The firm is also changing tack with regards to its strategy for the Chinese BEV market. All Toyota’s current Chinese operations are joint ventures with domestic OEMs — such as two new BEV models, the bZ3C crossover and the bZ3X SUV, it debuted at the Auto China '24 show in April last year that were developed alongside China's FAW.

But it has now incorporated a standalone company in Shanghai tasked with the development and local production of BEVs bearing the marque of its Lexus luxury brand, as well as batteries.

Establishing an on-the-ground operation “that handles everything from development to production will enable Toyota to offer vehicles tailored to local needs swiftly”, the firm reasons. It plans to have first vehicles in production in 2027, at a plant with initial capacity for 100,000 units/yr.

Interestingly, there is no suggestion that the new Chinese subsidiary will pursue any of Toyota’s usual hobby horses of hybrids or hydrogen. The former obsession is perhaps more understandable — of the over 30mn electrified vehicles Toyota has sold to the end of last year, 29.3mn of them were HEV, a further 750,000+ were PHEV and an additional almost 150,000 were MHEV (see main image).

In contrast, fewer than 200,000 were BEVs, despite the fact that Toyota has a previous stated ambition to sell 250,000/yr in Europe alone from as soon as 2026. But BEV volumes still dwarfed sales of FCEVs, which remain at less than 25,00 units despite Toyota's best efforts to promote the technology.

The Chinese Lexus all-electric initiative may be an encouraging sign that, as markets clearly embrace an all-electric future as enthusiastically as China has done, the Japanese automaker will be sufficiently nimble to put aside these ultimately blind alleys and concentrate on the task in hand of developing a competitive BEV line-up.

Its focus on speed to market, with which legacy OEMs have clearly struggled in the faster-moving Chinese market, is also welcome. And it may be telling that it is Lexus spearheading the new Chinese strategy — it may be that the Chinese all-electric mass market is already lost to non-domestic OEMs, but there will be space for ex-China brands to play in the premium segment.