This site noted, just five days ago, that Ford Motor Company was considering doing away with its all-electric F-150 Lightning line of trucks, because the buyer demand for the vehicles just wasn’t there. Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:
Toyota Doubles Down on Hybrids in the U.S. With $14-Billion Battery Push
New North Carolina plant is aimed at selling more hybrid cars and trucks to Americans
By Christopher Otts | Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 1:28 PM EST
LIBERTY, N.C.—Toyota, a longtime hybrid car and truck promoter, is making one of the industry’s biggest bets on green transportation and opening a $14 billion battery plant here.
For years, Toyota held out against electric vehicles while rivals retrofitted factories and launched models in preparation for an all-electric future. Now that the EV market in the U.S. is vanishing as tax credits expire and sales disappoint, Toyota is doubling down on its hybrid strategy.
The Japanese automaker’s gamble: that American consumers—many of whom won’t touch an EV—will buy increasing numbers of hybrids, which often get up to 50% better mileage than a standard gas-powered car.
Toyota also said it would invest up to $10 billion in U.S. manufacturing over the next five years in addition to the North Carolina site, where it made the largest investment in a U.S. battery-production site.
The batteries that Toyota has begun making at the sprawling plant, located between the cities of Greensboro and Raleigh, are going into hybrids assembled in Kentucky and Alabama. The complex is designed to make batteries for EVs and hybrids, including those that plug in and travel short distances on just electricity before switching to gas.
Our family are familiar with hybrids, as our older daughter had a 2017 Toyota Prius Hybrid, and now drives a 2024 Prius Hybrid. It’s a good, solid vehicle, and she put a ton of miles on her first hybrid, as her civilian job took her on frequent trips throughout the eastern half of the country. She put nearly 200,000 miles on it, before trading it in.
The reason she traded it in was, of course, the battery. It was beginning to fail, and Toyota wanted $8000 to change it. That has always been the problem with the hybrids, and it’s something Toyota, and other hybrid manufacturers, need to address. I’d bet 25€ that all Toyota did was spend less than $2000 to swap out the battery to sell it used.
“For the longest time, folks were criticizing Toyota that they were so slow to the game in the battery-electric business,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive. But the strategy worked, he said. “They really did focus on the traditional hybrids, and they are dominating that whole product segment.”
In other words, Toyota’s leadership were smart enough not to listen to Joe Biden and the Democrats, who were pushing a technology and infrastructure that was simply not ready.
Toyota did listen, however, to consumers, to new automobile buyers, and the company’s actions reflect the free market, and the choices people take in a free country.