Toyota says it’s listening to its customers all over the world and finally getting serious about fully electric vehicles. At an event in Brussels last week, the world’s largest automaker showed off a heavily updated bZ4X, the all-new C-HR+ and the recently released Urban Cruiser. While the cars they revealed are aimed at the European market, some of them seem very likely to make their way to other countries like the U.S. in the coming months.
Arguably Toyota’s biggest news came in the form of a shadowy slide at the end of a presentation to journalists. That image featured the silhouettes of three more EVs due out by 2026. One is most likely the larger three-row SUV Toyota plans to make in the U.S.
But one of them is very clearly a pickup truck.
Photo by: Toyota
Get excited, Tacoma and Hilux fans: The Toyota truck really does seem to be going electric.
Toyota’s European or U.S. spokespeople had nothing to offer about the mysterious truck in that image. But if we look at the automaker’s past announcements and concepts, we can make some educated guesses.
First and foremost, this isn’t really Toyota’s first rodeo with a fully electric truck. Later this year, it’s set to launch an EV Hilux model. But that’s a more bare-bones work truck with around 124 miles of range, built in Thailand and aimed primarily at that market or maybe a few exports. More crucially, that truck is a single-cab model and the one in the image certainly seems to be a double-cab design.
Photo by: Toyota
Some of the new Toyota EVs resemble ones shown off by then-CEO, now Chairman Akio Toyoda in late 2021. That leads us to believe it could be the truck revealed at that press briefing, which is very obviously an electric Tacoma. The only issue is that its proportions don’t exactly match what’s seen in the teaser image.
As enticing as a purely electric Tacoma would be, perhaps another concept gives us a better idea of what to expect: the Toyota EPU Concept from 2023.
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I first saw this myself at that year’s Tokyo Motor Show and I was immediately impressed. It’s a Tacoma-ish-sized truck with four doors and a unibody design that really leans into the fact that it’s an EV. It has a pass-through bed like the old Chevrolet Avalanche and the current Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV, and with that open and the tailgate down, the bed goes from 4.5 feet (137.16 cm) to 8 feet (244 cm) in length.
At the time, Toyota officials said that the U.S.-crafted design study was more of a lifestyle vehicle with a strong degree of capability rather than a hardcore rock-crawler—think Toyota’s take on a Rivian R1T and you’re close. But they also demurred when asked if that design was locked in for production or not.
While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn’t love trucks the way Americans love trucks. And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.
Photo by: Toyota
As for the third and final vehicle in those teasers, that one feels like it’s going to take less detective work to figure out. It’s fairly obviously the Land Cruiser Se, which is exactly what it sounds like: a battery-powered version of Toyota’s legendary SUV. Toyota showed that concept off at the same motor show in 2023 and it proved to be equally as popular.
More interestingly, Toyota had a Land Cruiser Se concept on display in Brussels for all to see. Coincidence? It certainly didn’t feel that way to me.
Photo by: Patrick George
For now, we have no credible information about either vehicle, except that Toyota intends on launching them before next year is out.
“BEVs [Battery-electric vehicles] will become an ever-more accepted part of life,” said Yoshihiro Nakata, the president and CEO of Toyota Motor Europe. “Now, without giving too much away, these next three parts [of Toyota’s EV strategy] will focus on enhancing the customer’s lifestyle just as powerfully as they enhance our carbon neutrality goals.”
When automakers talk “lifestyle,” they usually mean luxury, trucks and bigger vehicles, or some combination of those things. If this is really where Toyota’s EV game is headed next, it’ll make a lot of longtime fans quite happy.
What theories do you have about Toyota’s upcoming electric truck? Share them with us in the comments.
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