Japan

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 26, 2025 – Lexus is expanding its dedicated battery-electric RZ lineup with a special-edition RZ 600e “F SPORT Performance,” aiming for a sharper, more emotionally charged kind of EV driving when it arrives at Lexus dealerships across Japan on March 2, 2026.

A Special Edition That’s Meant To Feel Alive

Some electric cars impress you on paper, but leave you a little emotionally untouched once you’re behind the wheel. Lexus is clearly trying to push against that with the Special Edition RZ 600e “F SPORT Performance,” built to deepen the “Always On” idea—meaning the car should feel responsive and connected whether you’re cruising through a city evening or carving along a winding stretch of road.

"Always On"

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 19, 2025 – Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda—known affectionately as “Aki-chan”—just did something you don’t see every day: he walked into a high school classroom in Japan and taught a special lesson about cars, life, and what he hopes the next generation carries forward.

A New Kind of School Day in Ehime

The setting wasn’t a lecture hall or a boardroom. It was FC Imabari High School Satoyama in Ehime Prefecture, a private school that opened in April 2024 and is intentionally built around the idea that learning shouldn’t stay trapped inside a classroom.

One of the school’s defining features is a curriculum that blends studies with real-world projects, including corporate activities and engagement with the local community. In other words: students don’t just learn about life—they practice it, in public.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 19, 2025 – Toyota has launched the all-new, 6th generation RAV4 in Japan as a new-generation SUV built around the idea that “Life is an Adventure,” with a clear message: one model should fit many kinds of lives. Developed around “Diversification, Electrification, and Intelligence,” the new RAV4 keeps the nameplate’s solid, powerful look while leaning harder into choice, electrified performance, and software-driven comfort.

Three Personalities, One RAV4

If you’ve ever loved the RAV4 concept but wished it came with a clearer “this is me” vibe, Toyota is answering with three distinct styles. The lineup includes the sophisticatedly styled Z, the Adventure model designed to handle off-road driving, and the GR SPORT (scheduled for release within fiscal 2025, ending March 2026), which is focused on driving performance.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 19, 2025 – If you’ve been following Toyota’s “developing ever-better cars” era and waiting to see its newest flagships up close, January is about to get very tempting. TOYOTA GAZOO Racing (TGR) says it will exhibit at Tokyo Auto Salon 2026 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba City, Japan, from January 9 to 11, bringing the GR GT and GR GT3 for their first general-public reveal after their December 5 world premiere.

A Public Debut for Two New Flagships

Toyota is positioning the GR GT and GR GT3 as the stars of its booth, and the timing is part of the excitement: these models are moving from “world premiere” energy to real-life, in-person viewing. For anyone who likes to judge a car by stance, proportions, and details you simply can’t feel through a screen, a show like Tokyo Auto Salon is where the obsession usually begins.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 19, 2025 – Toyota didn’t present its new sports models like a typical “bigger, faster, louder” launch. Instead, the world premiere on December 5 at the Woven City Inventor Garage in Susono, Shizuoka, leaned into something more human: the craft of making cars, the pressure of being judged, and the stubborn decision to keep improving even when it would be easier to play it safe.

A Japanese Ritual That Explains the Mindset

The story begins with Shikinen Sengu at Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture, where a shrine is rebuilt every 20 years and sacred objects are moved from old to new. The shrine’s own explanation reads like a mission statement for any craft worth protecting: “The history of Japan and the spirit of our ancestors must never be cast aside. We must continue to safeguard those things that need to be preserved for the future. Doing so is more difficult than embracing change, and more important.”

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 18, 2025 – Some business books are all frameworks and buzzwords. This one is built from days, moments, and the kind of real-world tension that comes with working directly beside a high-profile leader. My Boss Akio Toyoda: An Author's True Story of 5,012 Days was published in September, and its author—Toyota Fellow Hideki Fujii—describes it as both a business book filled with Mr. Toyoda’s words and actions, and a human story about what it feels like to be “the subordinate” who has to deliver those words to the world.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 5, 2025 – For everyone who ever fell in love with a low-slung coupé on a poster, Toyota and Lexus just delivered a serious jolt of excitement: the world premiere of the Lexus LFA Concept EV sports car, together with the Toyota GR GT and GR GT3, promises a new era where performance, passion and future tech finally meet in one family of dream machines.

A World Premiere for Pure Driving Emotion

Held at Toyota’s Higashi-Fuji Plant in Eastern Japan, the event was less dry press conference and more love letter to car culture. It took place in a former press shop that once helped create the first Toyota Century in 1967 and is now reborn as the “Inventor’s Garage” of Woven City – a fitting stage for three radical new sports cars.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 5, 2025 – Lexus is looking beyond the gasoline era with the world premiere of the Lexus LFA Concept, a battery-electric sports car that turns the legendary LFA name into a bold statement for the EV age. Developed alongside TOYOTA GAZOO Racing’s new GR GT and GR GT3, the LFA Concept is designed to prove that high-voltage performance can still deliver goosebumps, soul and serious track credibility.

A legend reborn for the BEV era

The original V10-powered Lexus LFA has cult status among car fans. Now the name returns on a concept that swaps cylinders for cells, but keeps the same mission: pure driver immersion. Lexus calls the idea behind it “Toyota’s Shikinen Sengu” — a way of passing essential craftsmanship and driving know-how from one generation of engineers to the next, using a flagship sports car as the testbed.

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 5, 2025 – Toyota is turning its most hardcore motorsport know-how into two new dream machines: the GR GT, a road-legal race car, and the GR GT3, a full FIA-spec customer race car designed for people who genuinely want to win on Sundays and still enjoy the brand’s racing spirit the rest of the week.

Lead image suggestion: A low, wide, graphite-grey GR GT prototype speeding through a fast corner at sunset, with a GR GT3 in full race livery chasing behind it, motion blur on the track and heat shimmer around the cars to emphasize speed and drama.

Flagship sports cars with true racing DNA

SHERIDAN, WYOMING – December 5, 2025 – Imagine hailing a taxi in the middle of Tokyo, gliding away from the curb in near silence and realizing the car under you runs on hydrogen, not gasoline. That’s not sci-fi anymore – it’s the new reality in Japan’s capital, where hydrogen is stepping out of the lab and into everyday life, one ride and one building at a time.

Hydrogen on the streets: Crown taxis you can actually ride

On the busy streets of Tokyo, a new kind of Crown taxi has started to appear: a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) powered by hydrogen. These taxis are part of a public-private project launched by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in September 2025 to push hydrogen from “future promise” to “practical option.”