Toyota Announces Century Will Become Flagship Luxury Brand
Ever since your author was but a wee tot, the hierarchy for Toyota and Lexus was simple -- Toyota was the mainstream brand and Lexus was the luxury flagship.
Enter Century -- what was once a model of Japanese-market luxury cars and limos will now become a flagship brand for Toyota. Even more luxurious than Lexus.
Lexus, to be clear, will remain, though the plan is to go heavy on electric vehicles. The LS, which once reset the luxury market and showed what Toyota was capable of, is being killed.
Perhaps this news was foreshadowed a few years back when Toyota launched a Century SUV for the Chinese market.
A Century Coupe concept will be shown later this month at the 2025 Japanese Mobility Show, and the Century One of One concept will preview a luxury coupe with raised ground clearance.
It seems that Lexus will remain as the "main" luxury line, with a focus on innovation, while Century will exist to compete with niche brands that hand-build cars. Like Rolls-Royce.
Toyota also has plans to unveil a supercar on December 5th, with the public getting its first glimpse in January at the 2026 Tokyo Auto Salon.
[Images: Toyota]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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Is Toyota so hard up that they have to steal a car name from Buick?
A far cry from the company whose 1st Corolla started at $1666.