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Toyota is delaying the production of its first U.S.-made electric vehicle until 2026 at the earliest. Still, it says it’s going to sell as many as seven all-electric vehicles here within the next two years. It’s going to be very interesting to see if that actually happens with the EV market being as unpredictable as it currently is.
Initially, Toyota’s U.S. production of a three-row electric crossover at a plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, was slated to start late next year. However, a company spokesperson said it’ll be pushed until early 2026.
Still, Toyota is locked in on building the EV crossover in Kentucky in the early part of ’26 along with another EV SUV that’ll be built in a factory in Princeton, Indiana late that same year. From Bloomberg:
The planned expansion of Toyota’s EV lineup in the US from the current two vehicles to as many as seven comes at a time when demand for battery-powered vehicles has slowed. The US rollout is part of a broader goal to sell 1.5 million EVs globally by 2026. To help reach that, Toyota is building a lithium-ion battery plant in North Carolina that is expected to start up in 2025.
In February, Toyota said it would spend $1.3 billion to tool up its Kentucky factory for EV production, then in April followed up with an announcement to invest $1.4 billion in the Indiana facility for a second EV.
Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported the delay in EV production at the Kentucky plant earlier Wednesday, adding Toyota also has canceled plans to produce a Lexus brand SUV in North America by 2030.
Right now, Toyota sells the bZ4X and Lexus RZ450e, and they both kind of stink. Hopefully, this next generation of Toyota EVs will be far better than those two. Honestly, they need to be.
We shall see if these plans by Toyota actually pan out. So far, the Japanese automaker has been very slow on the uptake of electric vehicles, hedging on hybrids instead, and that plan has worked out for it.
A version of this article originally appeared in Jalopnik’s The Morning Shift.