Don’t Get Too Excited About Toyota’s First Electric Pickup Truck
Of all the major car brands, Toyota has been the most skeptical of EVs. Despite being the first automaker to find major success with hybrid electric technology with the Prius at the turn of the century, the Japanese giant has been slow to embrace fully-electric vehicles and makes just one EV today: the bZ4X crossover, which hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with its sales numbers.
But Toyota, slowly but surely, is coming around to EVs. The brand first revealed a concept of an electric pickup truck back in 2021, and now has revealed a whole lot more information about its electrified truck plans. Specifically, we now know what model it is, where it’s being produced and when it will arrive on the market.
Toyota’s First Electric Pickup Is the Hilux BEV
For anyone hoping for an electric Tacoma, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Toyota’s first fully-electric pickup is instead slated to be a Hilux, a vehicle that’s quite popular globally but is notoriously not sold in America (we get the bigger, boxier Tacoma instead).
The electric Hilux, which for now is being referred to by Toyota as the Hilux BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) is currently undergoing testing under various conditions as Toyota prepares to scale up mass production of the truck.
Is it going to meet the customer’s usage needs?
Pras Ganesh, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Asia
“The more range I have to put on it, the more battery I have to put on it, which means the weight of the vehicle also becomes significantly heavier, which means the loading can be much less,” executive vice president of Toyota Motor Asia, Pras Ganesh, told Reuters in an interview this week. “So ‘Is it going to meet the customer’s usage needs?’ is always our biggest issue. We are always trying to understand what they do.”
