Toyota succumbs and now plans to build a new EV in China first

Toyota is planning to build a new electric vehicle in China before Japan, breaking from its usual practice of developing cars at home first. The vehicle will be a Lexus-branded SUV, produced at a new Lexus plant in Shanghai starting next fall. Toyota expects to make about 1,000 vehicles a month at first, ramping up to tens of thousands by 2028. The car will use gigacasting, a manufacturing method that molds large sections of a vehicle's body in one piece, cutting costs and production time.

This is a shift for Toyota, which had scrapped an earlier plan to build a next-generation Lexus EV in Japan using similar methods. In the US and Japan, Toyota is still focused mainly on hybrid and gasoline vehicles rather than EVs. But China is Toyota's third-largest market, and low-cost domestic competitors like BYD are pressuring legacy automakers to move faster. Toyota's China sales are down 18% this year through July compared to the same period last year.

For homeowners, this news is about the global auto industry rather than anything that affects your house or energy upgrades directly. It signals that EV development and manufacturing are increasingly happening in China first, which may eventually shape which electric vehicles, including future Lexus models, become available in other markets like the US.