Toyota announced a $3.6 billion investment to more than double its San Antonio, Texas assembly plant with a second production line for Tacoma pickup trucks by 2030.
The expansion will create over 2,000 jobs and shift U.S.-market Tacoma production from Baja California, Mexico to Texas; an adjacent rear axle plant announced in 2024 is also nearing startup.
The investment is 80% higher than Toyota's initial estimates from May 2026, with additional funding directed toward advanced manufacturing technology for production flexibility.
Thailand has secured over $4.1 billion in investment pledges for its electric vehicle supply chain, solidifying its position as Southeast Asia's primary automotive manufacturing hub.
The investments reflect global carmakers realigning their production networks toward clean energy and EV/battery technologies as part of the industry-wide electrification shift.
This strategic repositioning leverages Thailand's established auto manufacturing base to capture regional EV supply chain opportunities and compete for next-generation vehicle production.
Chery officially inaugurated its Rosslyn plant in Pretoria, South Africa on July 3, 2026, marking its transition from importer to local manufacturer after acquiring the facility from Nissan in January 2026.
The plant will begin production in mid-2027 with an annual capacity of 50,000 units on a single shift, while retaining all 692 existing employees and creating approximately 3,000 supply chain jobs.
Chery has launched a localization program targeting 40% local content by 2028, with the originally 1963-built facility now undergoing comprehensive upgrades.
Xpeng announced Friday it will increase GX SUV output by 10% in July, with CEO He Xiaopeng stating the model targets entry into the premium SUV segment's top three by the fourth quarter.
The GX delivered 6,739 units in June and reached the 10,000-unit production milestone on July 1, following its May 20 launch at a starting price of 269,800 yuan that generated 24,000 firm orders within 12 hours.
The GX ramp-up contributed to Xpeng's June deliveries reaching 40,126 vehicles (a 15.93% year-on-year increase and monthly record for 2026).
NVIDIA and its partners announced major investments in American manufacturing and supply chains, with operations spanning 43 U.S. states as of July 2026.
The company has established advanced semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona for NVIDIA Blackwell chip production, with the partner network covering semiconductors, circuit boards, systems, racks and related infrastructure.
CEO Jensen Huang described this as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains," targeting support for healthcare, scientific discovery, industrial productivity and global technology leadership.
Researchers submitted a paper introducing H-Tac, a large-scale tactile-action dataset with 160 hours of egocentric human videos containing over 300 tasks and 135,000 episodes, paired with a Transferable Tactile Pre-Training (TTP) framework for robotic manipulation.
The dataset addresses critical limitations in existing tactile sensing systems, which suffer from small scale and narrow contact coverage; H-Tac's scale and task diversity enable larger-scale tactile-based pre-training compared to current alternatives.
The TTP framework preserves human knowledge during robot transfer by using unified tactile and action spaces across pre-training and post-training phases, with a tactile expert for future tactile prediction to improve performance on downstream dexterous tasks.
Hertz and Uber announced a partnership to scale robotaxi and driver-led fleet operations.
The combined stack includes Uber's $500M investment in Lucid (with commitment for 35,000+ Gravity SUVs), Lucid's robotaxi-sensor-equipped vehicles, Nuro's NVIDIA-powered autonomy system, and Nuro's 100 Gravity SUVs in engineering fleets across multiple U.S. cities.
The strategy, framed as a 'Moneyball' approach to building Waymo-competitive capabilities through aggregated components, already allows Uber employees to request robotaxis in San Francisco.