Karla Fisher, a Marine and retired engineer, arguably should have bought an electric vehicle a year ago.
There were federal incentives and a crowd of options, including the Ford F-150 Lightning, Honda Prologue and Nissan Ariya — all of which have since disappeared.
But none of those vehicles quite met Fisher’s specific requirements: at least seven inches of ground clearance, more than 250 miles of range and a price in line with — or slightly below — that of gas-burning alternatives. The Subaru Trailseeker, a new model that hit the market early this year, checked all the boxes. Fisher bought hers in September and already has put 2,000 miles on it, driving to trailheads, fishing holes and campsites near her home on the Oregon coast.
“I have been watching the EV market for more than a decade,” she said. “Alas, no cars were produced that made sense to me as a consumer in all that time.”
The battery-powered Subaru, she attests, is now her “most favorite car of all time.”
As U.S. auto executives cooled on electric cars this year, scrapping models and cutting production, Subaru Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. nosed into the void. With five new models, the companies have collectively sold almost 62,000 EVs in the U.S. in the first three quarters of 2026, more than double their year-earlier tally.
Though the brands still represent only 9% of the U.S. EV market and trail General Motors Co. in the space, their sales are growing, while rivals have gone in reverse. In the year to date, Rivian Automotive Inc., which also added a new truck, is the only other carmaker to post a gain in battery-powered business.
Subaru and Toyota are relatively late to the electric-car race, but their timing is propitious. While EV demand cooled when federal incentives expired in September, the market has stabilized and the ranks of electric-curious drivers are growing. Analysts say the two brands are scooping up drivers addled by high gas prices and market share that might have otherwise gone to larger rivals who scrapped EV models.
“It’s a reset for the EV market and it is resilience,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive Inc. “And you start to see this divergence of who’s winning the race and who’s pulling back.”
Toyota, which owns 20% of Subaru, is now selling two EVs in the U.S. to every one of Ford’s. And while Subaru is still a small player, Valdez Streaty said it is capitalizing on a renaissance in EV interest. The companies’ new EVs are affordable SUVs, which is the sweet spot of the U.S. car market, she added.
To some extent, the sales boom required as much luck as strategy. While it takes a long time to take a new car model from sketch to assembly line, scrapping one is relatively fast. When the U.S. EV market plummeted late last year, a cluster of models were pulled from production within weeks.
Meanwhile, the new EVs from Subaru and Toyota had been in the works for years and just happened to debut as gas prices spiked and the EV field had thinned considerably.
“There’s been so much volatility with EVs out there in terms of regulations that it’s been an interesting go,” said Timothy Tagye, vice president of field operations for Subaru of America Inc. “But our timing was good.”
Critically, the companies have partnered with each other in developing many of their latest EVs, sharing resources and splitting costs. While each brand put its unique stamp on external designs, underneath the metal, much of the machinery is shared.
Subaru spokesman Dominick Infante said the arrangement is the main reason sticker prices on the vehicles, including Subaru’s Trailseeker and Uncharted and Toyota’s C-HR and bZ Woodland, are relatively affordable. Priced from $35,000 to $45,000, all of the new models are well below what the average internal-combustion car sells for in America these days.
“We do believe there’s an EV future,” Infante said.
Toyota said its plan for some time has been to avoid trying to discern whether the auto industry would be gas-powered or electric. Its new EVs are just another option, alongside hybrids and machines that run solely on gasoline, according to Owen Peacock, general manager of Toyota marketing and communications.
Both brands now have a Goldilocks situation for EVs in the US: SUVs in sizes small, medium and large. Next year, they’ll each add an extra-large offering. An electric version of the three-row Toyota Highlander SUV, which Subaru will market as a new model dubbed Getaway, is expected to arrive in the spring.
“Our multi-pathway strategy is really kind of ‘let’s serve everybody’,” Peacock said, “versus, ‘Let’s move people from one to the next to the next.’”
Stock writes for Bloomberg.
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