When it comes to luxury, Toyota as a brand has always deferred to its Lexus brand. However, the highest luxury vehicle for the brand remains a Toyota, but given another name alongside it; Century.
The Century name has appeared a few times in automotive history, beginning life as a luxurious sedan rivaling Rolls Royce, and has since seen updates culminating in the latest Century SUV.
Toyota to spin-off Century as a new ultra-luxury brand?
There is an update though regarding the Century name, according to a Forbes article during the recently concluded Tokyo Auto Salon, an anonymous brand executive bared plans for the future. This ‘source’ claimed that with the new SUV, the target market has widened from outside Japan, and preparations are being made to position the Century name as a brand above Lexus.
Further driving this point home is the fact that they originally planned on just offering the vehicles with Century as the name, and dropping the Toyota branding. In preparation the SUV is slated to be offered outside of Japan in both left and right-hand drive markets, specific countries have not been named, but given the provenance of the brand we could expect to see the SUV scattered across the globe.
Now we wait and see just how soon Toyota plans to launch the new brand and if it pushes through altogether, but it is good to see that they haven’t given up on it.
