GEORGETOWN, Kentucky — Toyota Motor Corp. is coming for Tesla Inc.'s top spot in the U.S. electric vehicle market, at least according to one executive.

Mark Templin, Toyota Motor North America's executive vice president and chief operating officer, told The Detroit News in an interview following a $1 billlion U.S. manufacturing announcement last week that his company is preparing to launch some "freaking fantastic" battery-electric vehicles. "I call them Tesla killers," he added.

Toyota has been a purposeful laggard on EVs but aspires, according to Templin, to dramatically increase its share of the U.S. market for BEVs. The Japanese auto behemoth's share of the U.S. EV market currently sits at less than 2% but will seek to bring that number up to 15% in the coming years — in line with Toyota's overall U.S. market share.

Templin also said that Toyota's latest 10-figure investment announcement to retool machinery at plants in Kentucky and Indiana had little to do with the back-and-forth tariff and environmental policies coming out of Washington. Instead it signaled a long-term business plan meant to stand up to political crosswinds.

The 36-year veteran of the company, in his conversation with The News, discussed the philosophy at Toyota that informs those business plans, competition with General Motors Co. atop the U.S. auto industry's sales leaderboard, electrification, automation, manufacturing and more.

The following transcript of the sit-down conversation, which took place on March 23 at Toyota's Georgetown Assembly Plant in Kentucky, has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: Thanks for taking some time to chat, Mark. Let's start with the event today. What goes into an investment decision like the one Toyota just announced? How long is something like that planned before it's unveiled?

Answer: It can be years. There's a lot that goes into a decision. You don't go spending money unless you can create a business plan that you're pretty sure about. Our product cycles are long, the investment into new products is a lot of capital up front, and everything takes time.

Q: You said as we were sitting down that you've gone to Washington "a lot more the last couple of years." How much bearing does policy coming out of D.C. have on billion-dollar investment decisions? Especially the tariffs, how does that impact decision-making?

A: I worked at TMC (Toyota Motor Corp.) in Japan for four years, and one thing that I learned very clearly was that TMC does not make business decisions based on any short-term political decisions that are made because — especially here in the U.S., where the winds blow this way and then they blow that way — the hardest thing for business is not knowing what the rules are. And when the rules change all the time, it's very difficult.

So we don't make big investment decisions without having a clear pathway. We wouldn't have made an investment here (in Kentucky), and stayed here, and had so much success in 40 years if we were doing it just for some regulatory purpose.

Q: Let's jump to EVs. Toyota's battery-electric portfolio in the United States is tripling from two models last year to six by the end of 2026 — plus a seventh you teased today. Why expand? Why is now the time to make that leap?

A: We really believe in the portfolio approach to this. That's what we've been preaching since the beginning, and we know there's always going to be a place for gas engines, because we're a global automaker, and we do business almost everywhere.

There are a couple billion people on the planet who live without electricity. They can't drive electric cars. We know that. So their gas engines are going to be around for a long time. Hybrids are going to be around for a long time. Plug-in hybrids are going to be around for a long time. But there's a growing interest in BEVs.

People who have bought BEVs, a high percentage of them, want to stay in BEVs. So we believe that we're coming to the market at a time when there's going to be a demand — because those people bought up something, and they bought it because they didn't have a lot of choice (in BEV options). Now we're going to provide them choice.

Q: I want to focus in on this a little more. The jump from two to six BEVs seems big to me, especially by Toyota standards. The timing — is it because Toyota's North Carolina battery plant is now up and running? Because you learned lessons from launching the bZ4x model (now the bZ) a few years ago?

A: Those decisions happened long before — from the very beginning, we understood that there was going to be a marketplace for BEVs, but it takes time for people to get used to new technology.

When we came out with the first Prius in 1997, it took decades for us to make hybrids mainstream. Now hybrids are mainstream. Everybody wants hybrids — it's growing like crazy. The same thing will happen with BEVs. A lot of people are going to be reluctant to take on BEVs for some time.

But the people who already have, many of them want to stay in electrics — as long as they have a multicar household. Most of those people so far have one electric, plus a hybrid, or gas, or plug-in hybrid with it. So if they want to go on a longer trip, they can. It's not inconvenient to them.

Also, these decisions aren't just based on our U.S. marketplace. These are global decisions. These products that we're bringing in aren't just for the U.S. market only. They'll be sold in other markets as well.

Q: Toyota is celebrating its 40th anniversary in Kentucky. How does Toyota, or really any automaker, keep a good relationship with a state and a workforce for that long?

A: It has to be a partnership. You'll find that everything at Toyota is about partnerships: Whether it's the relationship we have with our suppliers, with our dealers, with the governments in the places where we produce cars.

People don't believe it, but it's not that hard. We see it like a marriage: You have to compromise, you have to work on it, you have to communicate, you have to make decisions together. And we feel like today, you heard what Gov. Beshear said earlier, it's been a great relationship for 40 years.

This was Kentucky's first example of making a shared investment with a company to create all these jobs, and it was such a successful model for them that they've used it over and over and over, all over the state. It drives the economy here. It drives employment for the people here — not only are our plant and our people, but all the suppliers around this plant that feed this plant that have brought other jobs here.

Q: The investment announced today is in high-tech equipment and retooling, with no new jobs added. Will that be the case across Toyota's broader $10 billion U.S. investment plan over the next five years?

A: I don't believe that our headcount will go down. Yes, there will be more automation. This plant is a great example of a lot of automation. If you've taken a tour here, it's pretty great, but it hasn't reduced our headcount requirements. More automation, more equipment requires more maintenance technicians, and you need more people to operate those things.

Robots that companies are building might replace some of the really bad jobs that people do now, jobs that people don't want to do. Hopefully, we can replace the jobs people don't want to do with automation robotics, and the people who used to do those jobs can operate the robots.

There's always going to be people in this. Manufacturers have tried to build cars without people, and it didn't work. Also, each investment in our different plants is going to be unique. Our investment announcement back in November did include new jobs.

Q: Thinking about competition with Detroit for a moment, Toyota was the U.S. leader in vehicle sales for the first time ever in 2021, though GM has since reclaimed that spot. Will Toyota leap GM again?

A: Our goal has never been to be No. 1 in total sales. Our goal is to sell each customer one car at a time. We focus on retail sales, not fleet sales.

Toyota has been the No. 1 retail brand in the U.S. for 15 years in a row now, and Lexus has been one of the top three luxury brands for 36 years in a row now — and now is at the top of the heap again.

I'll tell you a story about when I worked in Japan. I was working on the global Lexus business, and we reported directly to Akio Toyoda (Toyota's former CEO and current chairperson). I was a managing officer, and I sat in the meetings where we had the top 50 guys in the whole company.

Akio Toyoda would always talk to us about — he doesn't like talking about volume or share or profits. What he cares about — he goes, "Can we just talk about building great products, building great brands, and taking care of customers? All those other things are the results of doing the right thing."

So that's the way I feel about it. It's not like we're competing against GM. All we're trying to do is take care of customers, build the best cars we can, and focus on the retail market — because we don't care about selling cars to rental car fleets. That diminishes the resale value of your product, and it's not good for the brands.

Q: Another sales question. Will Toyota eventually be the top seller of EVs in the United States?

A: I don't know what that looks like in the future. But our goal is to, say, if we have 15% market share in all the market, why can't we also have 15% of the BEV market? That's what we're shooting for. We're trying to jumpstart our reputation for having great BEVs. We need to get people in our cars right now.

Our dealers are excited about the BEVs we're bringing to market. I was just in Japan driving some future BEVs, and they're freaking fantastic cars. And I call them Tesla killers, because now you have all these Tesla customers who love to drive electric cars — they want a real car. And they're going to get in a real car.

Q: What's the timeline on that 15% market share?

A: We haven't put a timeline on it. We've just said that whatever our overall share is, we deserve to get that of the BEV market.

Right now, we're selling everything we can build. All of our plants are running at capacity, and we're selling everything we can build as fast as we can build it. So, our dealer inventories are dropping. And we may have some months where we don't get to 15% share just because we don't have enough cars.

Q: To that point, there has been speculation in the automotive press that Toyota will build a new assembly plant somewhere in the United States. Is that going to happen?

A: I'll just tell you the same thing we've said for a long, long time: We like to build where we sell, and we like to buy where we build. And that won't change, but it all takes time and money.

You know, we just made a huge investment in West Virginia for sixth-generation hybrids, at our axle factory in Texas, the investment here in Kentucky, and we're still building out our battery plant in North Carolina. We have a lot on the table right now, so just be patient.

Q: And what about Toyota's seventh BEV, which will be built here in Kentucky. Will that be another three-row model? Anything to share on that?

A: Time will tell.

Q: Anything else you want to add that we haven't already touched on?

A: Well, I don't know how to say this without sounding like we're bragging, but I think Toyota is in a very different position than the rest of the industry.

We're able to sell everything we can build right now without a lot of incentive dollars, and we have such great product power and such great brand power now that we're behaving very differently than the rest of the industry.

People understand that, and we don't plan on changing that.

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