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Construction of Lexus' first US assembly line underway

The ES is Lexus' top-selling sedan, but the Japanese luxury marque has never manufactured it outside of Japan. In fact, Lexus has never made any cars in the United States, one of its largest markets worldwide. But that's about to change.
Yesterday, construction began in Georgetown, Kentucky, on the first Lexus assembly line in America, the first concrete (or steel) step in a $360-million expansion of Toyota's plant in the Bluegrass state that will create 750 new jobs. The expansion was announced last April by chief executive Akio Toyoda at the New York Auto Show.
Once the new assembly line gets online in the fall of next year, Toyota plans on building some 50,000 units of the ES each year. Lexus sold a record 72,581 examples of the ES in the United States last year - 30 percent more than the previous year - so Lexus will either have to import some more from overseas or leave some buyers disappointed.

New BBC Top Gear season is off to a great start

The past few years have been very demanding for Top Gear fans. The Jeremy Clarkson Top Gear got too big for itself, and the core quality of the series degraded as stunts and jokes gradually became more and more stale. Things came to a head with the Fracasgate, with Clarkson punching a producer in a very nice hotel in Yorkshire with a very nice brass plaque commemorating "The End of Clarkson's BBC Career". Fast forward to a year ago, when the BBC produced a new series of Top Gear, with famed breakfast show person and shouting enthusiast Chris Evans hosting. Laden with personnel and curiously lacking any direction, the first new season collapsed onto itself with Evans eventually quitting the entire shindig. After that, viewers received a new, Amazon-produced Clarkson-Hammond-May series called The Grand Tour, which was often brilliant and just as often hampered by writing as hackneyed as the last Clarkson years of Top Gear. Now the slate is clean. Evans is gone. The first Grand Tour season has aired. The BBC has had a good long time to re-evaluate its strategy. And the first episode of this season's Top Gear has aired in the UK - and will air March 12 on BBC America. Your first extended look at all new #TopGear, coming 5 March. See you there pic.twitter.com/lYoYOtrWxR — Top Gear (@BBC_TopGear) February 23, 2017 What an improvement! It seems like the producers have taken an ax to everything not strictly necessary for making a great car show, and they've left what is absolutely crucial. There are the three car guys, Matt LeBlanc, Chris Harris and Rory Reid. There is a new studio. There is a new track car. There is a celebrity, but it's not painful to watch. There are easy jokes, there are car jokes, there are Ronin jokes. Ronin jokes! It's as if Harris, by dissecting continuity errors in the 1998 film's BMW chase, is reaching out to us fans, saying he's one of us, and he did notice the wrong wheels when the black BMW falls from the bridge. (Other mistakes are wrong-colored tach needles, for instance.) The first car film is a quality Ferrari FXX K piece, with Harris enjoying one of the 40 built track-day specials on the bankings of Daytona. It's remarkable it was Harris who was allowed to drive the exclusive Ferrari, as the first "outsider" (in his words) to drive one; years ago Harris was one of the most vocal critics of Ferrari's practices, resulting in him getting banned from driving press Ferraris. But then again, this is a customer car.

Does the Toyota Prius still matter?

Toyota remains incredibly proud of its green halo car, the Prius. On the company website, it calls the gas-electric car, "The hybrid that started it all." Chances are, if someone tells you to think of a hybrid car today, your first thought is going to be the Prius. Now a cultural icon, the Prius changed a lot of attitudes about what an efficient car is able to achieve. But the car is aging, despite numerous refreshes and model tweaks over the years, and sales dropped 11.5 percent last year. It's taken Toyota 25 years of ups and downs to get the Prius to where it is today, and we started wondering if that's too long for the car to remain viable in an era of 40+ mile-per-gallon non-hybrid cars and a plethora of plug-in competitors for the green car crown (we're not the only ones). Plus, Toyota is rapidly shifting its green focus away from the Prius and towards the hydrogen-powered Mirai fuel cell car. But if you ask Toyota representatives if the Prius is still a vital car in 2015 – and we did – you'll find that there's still a lot of love for the car that went before. For example, Geri Yoza is a Toyota national manager who spent years traveling all across the US teaching people about the Prius. The veteran of countless customer education sessions told AutoblogGreen that it took a long time for the Prius to "cross the technology chasm," and that it wasn't until about a decade after launch that the car became a common sight outside of the initial popularity hotspots. "It takes a while for people to become confident in the technology, to understand that it's been proven," she said. Now that the hybrid is ensconced in the public mind, it's time for the next step. "I think the Prius, the whole idea 'to go before,' was to go before the Mirai." Part of that precursor status is due to the fact that a lot of the Prius' powertrain technology has made the jump to the Mirai. When we asked Bob Carter, Toyota's senior vice president of automotive operations, if the Prius still matters, he had a clear answer: "My goodness, yes." "We've been selling hybrids for 25 years," he said, "but when you go back, we had said that the Prius and hybrid technology were a bridge to the future and we were very clear that it's going to be a very long bridge. Essentially, and I'm not an engineer, the Mirai takes the technology from the Prius and takes the ICE engine out and puts a fuel cell stack in.