Toyota flips the switch on $14billion US megafactory to build battery-powered cars as sales boom
By Ben Shimkus
Daily Mail
Nov 14, 2025
Toyota's new battery plant in Liberty, North Carolina
Toyota just flipped the switch on a $14billion battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina.
It's the Japanese automaker's first battery plant outside Japan and the company's biggest single-site investment ever. Toyota expects to hire 5,000 staffers.
The plant comes amid a massive shift for automakers.
Clouds have been cast over the future of fully electric vehicles — the government's $7,500 tax credit ended, automakers have been laying off American workers who built EVs, and some companies might discontinue money-losing cars.
But Toyota's approach is different: it's leaning into booming hybrid sales.
'Toyota has put more vehicles with electrified powertrains on the road than any other automaker,' Emily Holland, a spokesperson for Toyota, told the Daily Mail. 'Hybrids represent an entry point into vehicle electrification.'
The North Carolina plant will build lithium-ion batteries for three types of products — hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and fully electric vehicles — with the vast majority devoted to hybrids that Toyota can't build fast enough.
This year, more than half of Toyota's cars sold in the US have some form of electrified engine.
Toyota said sales of its hybrid, plug-in, and fully electric cars exceeded its gas-only sales in 2025. The Toyota Crown hybrid car is pictured here
And multiple Toyota best-sellers have gone hybrid-only. The ever-popular Camry no longer offers a gas-only version, and the RAV4, America's best-selling non-pickup truck, will drop its gas-only option in 2026.
In North Carolina, just four of the new facility's 14 planned lines are running, enough to supply battery packs for roughly 600,000 hybrids a year, including the Toyota Camry built in Kentucky and the Corolla Cross SUV in Alabama.
Meanwhile, the plant's plug-in and EV facilities remain more modest.
Toyota is building out capacity for about 74,000 plug-in hybrids and just 45,000 fully electric vehicles.
Those batteries will eventually power a new three-row, American-built electric SUV that Toyota hasn't revealed yet. The company told the Daily Mail it is scheduled to launch in late 2026.
It's a cautious approach that Toyota executives say matches where American buyers actually are.
'Toyota is a pioneer in electrified vehicles, and the company's significant manufacturing investment in the US and North Carolina further solidifies our commitment to team members, customers, dealers, communities, and suppliers,' Ted Ogawa, the company's US-based chief executive, said.
This massive investment also lands amid a shifting political and economic landscape for automakers.
Toyota's new North Carolina plant sends batteries to its sprawling Kentucky facility (pictured), where the Japanese automaker makes the ever-popular Camry sedan
Toyota broke ground on the facility in 2021, when the Biden administration was focused on building out battery manufacturing in the US.
But US sales of fully electric cars haven't accelerated as lawmakers initially hoped.
President Donald Trump said last month that Toyota would pump $10billion into the US, though the company didn't clarify how the new plant relates to its those spending plans.
At the same time, the industry is navigating Trump's sweeping tariffs on cars and parts.
Cars built in Japan — including around 30 percent of the Toyotas rolling off American dealership lots — are slapped with a 15 percent tariff at the US border.
Toyota's rate has angered Detroit automakers, who often have to pay more in tariffs for US-assembled vehicles.
And tariffs haven't slowed Toyota's momentum.
US sales are up 9.9 percent through the third quarter — more than 1.3million vehicles — driven largely by hybrids, the company can't build fast enough.
The automaker has the lowest days-on-lot metric in the industry, a measure of how quickly vehicles sell after arriving at dealerships.
And with four production lines humming in North Carolina and 10 more on deck, Toyota's bet is clear: the future might be electric, but the runway for hybrid sales remains intact.
1 comment:
In 2023 we bought a Toyota Crown Limited hybrid. We paid a good amount for it. Through meticules calculations it turns out that in the long run we have saved money. Before the hybrid purchase I was paying on average $75 to $80 a week for gas in the GMC Yukon. I now pay between $21 to $25 a week.
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