Toyota Motor opened the Toyota Battery Center of North America (TBC), a battery evaluation and development facility, in Saline, Michigan, on October 1, 2026. The 30,000-square-foot (about 2,800 square meters) facility will support Toyota's battery plants and vehicle plants in North America.
Battery mass production has already begun in North Carolina. With the new center, Toyota adds a site that evaluates performance and durability under real-world U.S. conditions. By also working with the University of Michigan's prototyping and research facilities, Toyota aims to strengthen a system in which it makes batteries in North America and feeds evaluation results back into the next round of development.
Evaluating everything from cells to battery packs under U.S. conditions
At TBC, engineers will evaluate batteries for hybrid electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The center will also cover technologies for hydrogen vehicles and battery electric vehicles (BEVs), supporting Toyota's strategy of pursuing multiple electrification technologies in parallel.
Toyota explains in its announcement of the opening that development will span the entire battery life cycle, from raw materials sourcing to use in vehicles and recycling.
One goal is to evaluate batteries used in North America more quickly and locally. Jordan Choby, who leads Toyota's powertrain operations in North America, said the center will help detect and resolve problems that arise in the market faster, closer to where they occur, and contribute to developing batteries that last longer even in the conditions American drivers face every day.
However, these are effects the new center is meant to achieve. They are not test results showing how much problem-response times or battery life have actually improved.
The investment plan for the facility was announced in June 2023, with an investment of about $50 million. Toyota's plan page, updated in October 2025, says the center will check not only battery performance but also quality and durability, and evaluate whether batteries meet the requirements of North American customers.
The $50 million is the investment scale presented at the planning stage. It has not been newly confirmed as the final amount spent at the time of this opening.
The evaluation is expected to cover everything from cells, the basic unit of a battery, to battery packs assembled for vehicles. It links the process of examining the characteristics of individual cells with the process of checking how they behave as an in-vehicle system.
The original plan also included evaluating standard and fast charging, and checking connections to power sources and charging infrastructure. The idea is to evaluate not just the battery itself but also real-world scenarios of charging and using it in a vehicle.
These, however, are activities described at the planning stage, and the opening announcement alone does not allow us to conclude that all of the equipment is already in operation.
Dividing roles across mass production, evaluation, and prototyping in North America
Toyota announced the start of production at its North Carolina battery plant on November 12, 2025. According to the announcement at the time, the plant, in which Toyota has invested about $14 billion, was shipping battery modules for hybrid vehicles to vehicle plants in Kentucky and Alabama.
In other words, the manufacturing network that TBC will support in North America already includes a site that mass-produces batteries and supplies them to vehicle plants.
Organizing public materials by main role, the North Carolina plant handles mass production, Toyota's Michigan site handles evaluation and development, and the University of Michigan handles cell prototyping, research, and workforce training.
| Site / organization | Publicly stated main role | Confirmed activities and date of source |
|---|---|---|
| Toyota North Carolina battery plant | Development and mass production of lithium-ion batteries | Shipping hybrid vehicle modules, announced November 12, 2025 |
| Toyota Michigan TBC | Battery evaluation and development for North American manufacturing sites | Facility handling batteries for a wide range of electrified vehicles, opened October 1, 2026 |
| University of Michigan EVC / Battery Lab | Cell prototyping, research, engineer training | Facility use and opening of reservations described in its 2025 activity report; cell prototyping process introduced in an article dated September 24, 2026 |
The table organizes the functions each party announced in 2025–2026 by main role. It is not a comparison of performance or production efficiency under the same conditions, and actual roles overlap in places. The North Carolina plant also handles battery development, and the university also conducts research on battery performance. Nor does the table show that the university and TBC are operated as a single, continuous joint process.
The mass-production figures also call for caution. The North Carolina plant is planned to have 14 production lines and will support batteries for BEVs and plug-in hybrids in addition to hybrids. Annual production capacity at full operation is given as 30 GWh, with additional lines planned to come online by 2030.
The 30 GWh is the capacity the plant is eventually expected to have. It does not represent output at the start of production or current annual production.
TBC's role is to raise the ability to evaluate North American-made batteries locally and feed the results back into product development. Making batteries in volume and verifying their quality and durability are separate jobs.
As mass-production volume grows, the plant will also need functions to investigate problems that occur in actual vehicles and to confirm the effects of changes to materials or structure. This investment is intended to allow such evaluation and development to take place close to North American manufacturing sites.
University partnership also covers cell prototyping and workforce training
The University of Michigan's Electric Vehicle Center (EVC) already operates battery prototyping facilities and education programs.
According to the university's 2025 activity report, "Battery Lab 2.0" at Ellsworth in Ann Arbor has entered the usage phase. The university expanded its pilot-scale equipment and began taking reservations for users and research partners. It is a separate facility from Toyota's newly opened TBC.
The cell development process the university introduced in September 2026 includes mixing and coating electrode materials, calendering (compressing electrodes with rollers), and then assembling cells in a dry room.
The university studies how differences in materials and manufacturing conditions affect capacity, performance under rapid charging and discharging, and lifespan over repeated charge-discharge cycles. It has equipment not only to consider candidate materials but also to build prototype cells and evaluate their characteristics.
Toyota has said that, through its partnership with EVC, it intends to make TBC's facilities and research capabilities available to other research partners as well.
If the partnership between the university's prototyping facilities and the company's evaluation facilities advances, research findings on materials and manufacturing conditions obtained at the university may become easier to evaluate under conditions close to actual in-vehicle use.
However, it has not been disclosed how joint testing will be carried out or to what extent research data will be shared. The fact that the university's prototyping facilities are already in use should be distinguished from the future policy of opening TBC to research partners.
The partnership also has a workforce-training role. In its 2025 activity report, EVC says it advanced an EV technician education program with Schoolcraft College and battery training for community college instructors.
Participating automakers include GM, Mercedes-Benz, and Hyundai in addition to Toyota. These existing education and research activities are the background to Toyota positioning the TBC-university partnership as also serving to train the next generation of battery engineers and skilled workers.
Meanwhile, the opening announcement does not specify when and under what conditions outside researchers will be able to use TBC. The policy of "opening to research partners" cannot be taken to mean that general access has already begun.
How students and engineers doing research and training at the university's prototyping facilities will actually work with Toyota's evaluation facility will be a key way to judge the substance of this initiative.
How long batteries will last remains to be judged by future results
What was announced is the opening of a facility for evaluating and developing batteries. It is not an announcement that new battery materials have improved performance or driving range, nor does it signal the start of mass production of solid-state batteries.
Judging how far Toyota's stated goals of longer battery life and faster response to defects are realized will require results accompanied by specific usage conditions and measurement methods.
For example, if lifespan is said to have been extended, it must be confirmed under which temperature and charge-discharge conditions, and by how much, it improved compared with conventional products. For new materials or manufacturing technologies, what matters is whether results obtained with prototype cells can be reproduced in battery packs and mass-production vehicles.
Opening a facility is different from product improvements emerging from it. The new center's effect can be judged concretely only once evaluation results are reflected in actual product design and mass-production processes.
In North America, alongside the battery plant responsible for mass production, TBC for battery evaluation and development and the university's facilities for cell prototyping, research, and workforce training are now coming into place.
If research use of TBC takes concrete shape and evaluation results obtained in North America lead to improvements in the design and manufacturing processes of mass-produced batteries, Toyota may be able to shorten the cycle of evaluating and improving batteries produced in the U.S. locally.