Toyota may begin constructing electrical vehicles in Kentucky as quickly as 2025 by updating an current manufacturing unit, Nikkei reported Tuesday.

The transfer may enable Toyota autos to qualify for the $7,500 federal tax credit score beneath new guidelines, instituted beneath the Inflation Discount Act (IRA), requiring North American meeting of autos and battery packs. Toyota beforehand introduced plans to make EV batteries within the U.S. at a brand new North Carolina manufacturing unit by 2025.

Positioned in Georgetown, Kentucky, the manufacturing unit reportedly eyed for EV manufacturing opened in 1988. It at the moment builds Camry Hybrid and RAV4 Hybrid fashions for the principle Toyota model, in addition to Lexus ES sedans and inline-4 and V-6 engines. Toyota says the manufacturing unit is at the moment able to producing 550,000 autos and greater than 600,000 engines yearly.

2016 Lexus ES manufacturing in Georgetown, Kentucky

Per the report, Toyota can be aiming to supply 200,000 EVs within the U.S. from 2026 onward. Together with manufacturing in Japan, China, and India, the automaker is aiming to supply a million EVs globally by that point, in response to the report.

This might be a fast change in fact for Toyota. As Nikkei notes, over over 9 million Toyota autos produced in 2022, simply 24,000 had been EVs. And whereas Toyota is Japan’s largest automaker, within the EV subject it is outclassed by Tesla, which offered 1.31 million autos globally final yr, Nikkei famous.

Toyota’s change of CEO does not going sign an enormous shift to extra EVs, and as not too long ago as final month the automaker once more introduced its logic behind emphasizing hybrids. Though Toyota’s accelerated battery plans are most likely the strongest trace that it is critical about making EVs within the U.S. An under-construction North Carolina battery plant initially slated to make hybrid batteries is now getting a $2.5 billion enlargement to accommodate EV battery manufacturing.

2023 Toyota bZ4X Restricted AWD

A devoted EV platform was additionally reportedly given the inexperienced mild, however it could be 5 years off. Toyota at the moment has nothing like Hyundai’s E-GMP or Volkswagen’s MEB platform that is designed for high-volume manufacturing.

That may imply the primary EVs assembled within the U.S. would both be conversions of internal-combustion fashions, or maybe constructed on the identical e-TNGA platform because the Toyota BZ4X, Subaru Solterra, and Lexus RZ 450e. All three fashions are heading to the U.S., though a few of the accompanying tech, like a steer-by-wire yoke, will not be accessible at launch.