Toyota plans first next-generation electric utility vehicle for Europe

Toyota's first full-electric vehicle based on its e-TNGA platform will be a utility vehicle similar in size to the RAV4.

The vehicle will go on sale in Europe "in couple of years," Toyota Europe’s sales and marketing chief, Matt Harrison, said in a video chat. "We are moving into launch mode for the vehicle."

Toyota Europe's product and marketing director, Andrea Carlucci, said the utility vehicle will be the automaker's first pure electric car developed for Europe.

In a statement on Monday, Toyota said it will announce further details in the coming months.

The model will be one of the 10 zero-emissions vehicles the automaker plans to launch in Europe by 2025, executives from Toyota’s European division said.

The utility vehicle, developed with Subaru, will be the fifth of the 10 models. Toyota and Subaru announced their EV cooperation last year.

The others include the Proace City electric compact van developed by Toyota’s van partner, PSA Group. Proace City deliveries will start next autumn.

Toyota will also begin sales of its second-generation Mirai fuel cell car next year.

Toyota already sells two full-electric models, the Lexus UX 300e compact utility vehicle and a battery-powered version of its Proace midsize van.

The new battery-electric utility vehicle will be built at Toyota’s so-called ZEV Factory in Japan.

Toyota has not said whether it will sell the electric utility vehicle outside of Europe. In a separate video chat, Toyota's head of sales for North America, Bob Carter, said the company would jump into the battery-electric fray in North America, though he declined to identify which of the company's brands would do so.

During an online forum Monday, Toyota also said that by 2025 it would start sales of an electric car using a solid-state battery, a new technology that alters the chemistry to reduce weight and cut charging time.

The company gave no further details on the model but suggested that it could be a low-volume brand-builder in the same way as the first Mirai fuel cell car.

"We may start with something that is not necessarily mainstream but the ambition is to gradually expand," a Toyota spokesman said.

The automaker will produce six models on the e-TNGA (the Toyota New Global Architecture for electric cars) for the Toyota brand and Lexus.

When it announced the platform in October 2019, Toyota said e-TNGA was flexible enough to accommodate everything from an SUV with three rows of seating to a sporty sedan to a small crossover or a compact car.

The modular approach to the platform will support rear-wheel-, front-wheel- and all-wheel-drive layouts and differing battery sizes range from 50 kilowatt hours to 100 kWh.

Toyota has been slow to roll out electric vehicles compared with its biggest global rival in size, Volkswagen Group, but is aiming to make up lost ground using both e-TNGA and fuel cell vehicles such as the Mirai.

Toyota expects that sales of plug-in vehicles, such as plug-in hybrids and electric cars, as well as fuel cells cars, will account for 20 percent of its volume in its European region, which includes Russia, by 2025. At that time it aims to have overall European sales of 1.4 million vehicles, equating to a 6.5 percent share of the market.

Toyota Europe CEO Johan van Zyl said he expected the automaker's share of plug-in and fuel cell vehicles to rise to 35 percent by 2030, with full-hybrid vehicles at 50 percent and plug-in hybrids at 10 percent.

The popularity of Toyota’s full-hybrid cars helped Toyota increase its market share in its European region to 5.9 percent in the first nine months from 5.1 percent a year earlier, according to data from industry association ACEA.

Toyota sold 1.09 million vehicles in 2019 across its European region.