Toyota’s new battery plant in North Carolina will deliver batteries for both hybrid and all-electric vehicles as well as battery elements such as cathodes, says the executive in charge of construction.
Srini Matam, group vice president-powertrain, production engineering and shared services, says the plant will begin making batteries for Toyota hybrid vehicles in first-quarter 2025, followed by batteries for electric vehicles toward the end of 2025.
Matam (pictured, below left) tells Wards Toyota has chosen a very deliberate strategy as it prepares for the transition to BEVs. The automaker in 2021 announced a $1.29 billion investment in the battery plant now under construction in Liberty, NC, and said in August it was investing an additional $2.5 billion, bringing total employment to 2,100.
Toyota’s Production Engineering Group, which is expanding its staff of 1,300, is developing systems and technology that will allow the company’s U.S. assembly plants to build vehicles with a variety of powertrains, including BEVs, on the same assembly line, Matam says.
However, the company’s strategy, which was outlined recently by Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda during a dealer meeting in Las Vegas, also takes into account the multiple hurdles standing in the way of wider BEV adoption.
The charging infrastructure required to support BEVs is not fully in place, while the supply chain for delivering materials required for automotive-grade batteries is still developing, Matam says.
Consequently, Toyota expects consumers to continue to demand vehicles with conventional internal- combustion engines and hybrid powertrains for the foreseeable future, Matam says, adding hybrids account for more than 25% of the automaker’s Toyota and Lexus sales.
No one at Toyota is against the shift to BEVs, Matam stresses. “We’ve got to react to the market,” he says, adding there will be a migration to electric vehicles but it will take several years to compete.
Toyota Battery Mfg. North Carolina (TBMNC) will have four production lines, each capable of delivering enough lithium-ion batteries for 200,000 vehicles – with plans to expand to at least six production lines for a total of up to 1.2 million vehicles per year.
The $1.29 billion investment made by Toyota and Toyota Tsusho, the automaker’s in-house trading company responsible for lining up sustainable supplies of key materials, is funded from a total investment of approximately $3.4 billion in BEV production in North America announced in the fall of 2021.
Toyota, Matam notes, is working on battery development with Panasonic, having established a joint venture, Prime Planet Energy & Solutions, which specializes in prismatic cells which will serve as the basis for the automaker’s EV batteries. Prime Planet also is working on solid-state batteries.
