Toyota simply introduced a $1.3 billion funding in its Kentucky manufacturing facility to construct EVs, together with its three-row electrical SUV for the US market.
The funding helps the beforehand introduced future battery EV meeting at Toyota Kentucky. It’s additionally including a battery pack meeting line, with batteries being provided by Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina.
Kerry Creech, the president of Toyota Kentucky, mentioned, “At this time’s announcement displays our dedication to automobile electrification and additional reinvesting in our US operations.”
In October 2023, Toyota introduced it could make investments an extra $8 billion in its North Carolina EV battery plant, which it first introduced in December 2021, to make batteries for its EVs and PHEVs. It’s anticipated to be prepared subsequent 12 months.
Electrek’s Take
Toyota’s EV funding announcement is sweet information, and fingers crossed, alerts one other critical shift from the foot-dragging firm towards REAL EVs.
Regardless of placing huge cash into electrification efforts, Toyota has a historical past of fudging what electrification means, pushing its hybrids as EVs in advertising and marketing campaigns, and speaking about hydrogen.
It says it has 26 “electrified” fashions, however it solely sells two battery-electric autos, the bZ4X SUV and the Lexus RZ. The opposite 24 are hybrid fashions, in order that’s a fudge.
That’s a part of its “electrified diversified” marketing campaign, which, as my colleague Jameson Dow wrote in November 2023, “is Toyota’s try to push autos which might be fully powered by fossil fuels as if they’re an necessary a part of an automaker’s technique towards carbon neutrality.”
Dow explains:
Hybrid autos just like the (non-plug-in) Prius run fully on gasoline. There may be zero power that enters the automobile system that isn’t put there by restricted and polluting fossil fuels, of the type that contributes to tens of millions of deaths globally per 12 months. You can’t energy a Prius on carbon-neutral power, and a Prius will not be zero-emission.
Toyota’s technique, which displays its conservative company tradition, has been wrongly steered by its perception that the market and EV expertise nonetheless have to mature to satisfy its reliability and effectivity requirements.
So, whereas it’s been sluggish to pivot towards EVs, and its greenwashing campaigns are unfair to shoppers, Toyota’s announcement immediately sees it placing its cash the place its mouth… isn’t.
This shift hopefully signifies that the Japanese automaker is shifting away from its hesitance in recognizing the rising significance of BEVs within the US market. As a result of if it doesn’t, its residence nation may undergo for it.
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