Toyota presents one of its most important new models in ages. This is the Toyota bZ4X, an electric SUV that will hit the market next year. It will have front and four-wheel drive and should be able to travel up to 450 kilometers on a full battery.
- Toyota’s first electric SUV in Europe
- Introduces new platform
- Up to 450 km range
- Front and all-wheel drive, up to 218 hp
- More spacious than RAV4
- On the market next year
Although Toyota already supplies various electric commercial vehicles and passenger versions borrowed from Stellantis, Toyota does not have an electric car in its range except for the fuel cell Mirai. Strikingly, Toyota has been master of hybrid powertrains in Europe for decades. Next year there will be other cards on the table. Then Toyota will launch its first battery electric passenger car in Europe. This is the Toyota bZ4X, an electric SUV that brings promising figures.
Does the chunky and sharp folds of the Toyota bZ4X look familiar to you? That may well be true. The bZ4X is the production version of the bZ4X Concept shown in Shanghai in April. Over the past five months, Toyota has no doubt been very busy, but not updating the design of the bZ4X. The electric SUV looks like two drops of water on its conceptual predecessor. It is striking that the design of the bZ4X with its closed nose and almost sleepy-looking LED headlights is completely new within Toyota, but that the design is still in line with that of cars like the RAV4.
Toyota bZ4X
Dimensions
Extensive figures about the size of the bZ4X will keep Toyota under wraps for a while. The brand does give a nice impression of what you can expect from it. In terms of length, the electric Toyota seems to operate in the segment of cars like the RAV4, although the bZ4X is 8.5 centimeters lower than the SUV according to Toyota. According to the brand, the wheelbase of the bZ4X is 16 centimeters longer than that of the RAV4, which means that the distance between the front and rear axle is no less than 2.85 meters. This makes the wheelbase of the bZ4X equal to that of the almost 5 meters long Highlander and 9 centimeters larger than that of the Volkswagen ID4 and Skoda Enyaq iV. Toyota’s latest electric model promises to offer a sea of ​​interior space. The luggage compartment is 452 liters, so it seems that it is mainly the passengers who benefit from the space.
Technic
The Toyota bZ4X is the brand’s first car to feature on the E-TNGA modular platform dedicated to electric vehicles. The first, but certainly not the last. The bZ part in the name of this study model stands for ‘Beyond Zero’ and is the prefix with which Toyota indicates that it is an electric model. You can compare it with the Ioniq label of Hyundai, the i-line of BMW and the EQ department of Mercedes-Benz. The number after ‘bZ’ indicates the car’s placement in the range, while the X indicates it is a crossover or SUV.
Like the platform the car uses, the bZ4X was developed together with Subaru. Subaru, which will launch its own version of the bZ4X on the European market with the Solterra in the middle of next year, has mainly focused on four-wheel drive. However, the bZ4X will also be available with front-wheel drive. The front-wheel drive variant has a 204 hp and 265 Nm electric motor that accelerates the electric SUV to 100 km/h in 8.4 seconds. The four-wheel drive version has two 218 hp and 336 Nm of powerful electric motors that shorten the 0-100 sprint to 7.7 counts. Regardless of the chosen powertrain, the bZ4X has a top speed of 160 km/h. The battery pack measures 71.4 kWh in both cases.
Excellent performance, but more interesting is of course the electric range. In anticipation of European homologation, Toyota already reports a provisional range of more than 450 WLTP kilometers. The bZ4X comes with a heat pump as standard and the water-cooled battery can be charged to 80 percent of its capacity on a 150 kW fast charger in about 30 minutes. Toyota estimates that the battery pack placed in the bottom has lost only 10 percent of its capacity in ten years – or after 240,000 kilometers driven. Very different from the battery of your smartphone that has lost a lot of power after a year of life. Just like the Prius, the bZ4X will soon be available with solar cells on its roof, although you will of course have to draw the lion’s share of the power required for driving from the charging station or socket.
If you go for the four-wheel drive Toyota bZ4X, you will get a driving mode (XMODE) and Grip Control, among other things. The first system operates at speeds up to 20 km/h and is intended for driving on, for example, snowy or muddy roads and trails. Grip Control works up to a speed of 10 km/h and is for the rougher work. Incidentally, it is striking that Toyota has made front-wheel drive units of the bZ4X of the versions without four-wheel drive. With brands such as Volkswagen, Skoda, Hyundai and Kia, the electric ‘two-wheel drive’ is rear-wheel drive.
Toyota bZ4X
Interior
Whoever thought that the crazy steering wheel that Tesla introduced in this year’s facelifted Model S and Model X would not show up on other brands, is wrong. Like the conceptual forerunner of the Toyota bZ4X, the electric SUV has an obstinate and almost rectangular ‘steering wheel’ that would not look out of place in the cockpit of an airplane. One Motion Grip Control, Toyota christens its special steering wheel. Thanks to the fully variable responses to input from the steering wheel, which can be done through steer-by-wire, there is no longer any need to repack the steering wheel when cornering, according to Toyota.
Like the exterior of the SUV, the dashboard closely follows that of the bZ4X Concept. The Toyota bZ4X has a dashboard placed low in the car with almost all buttons and controls located on the steering wheel and the center tunnel. Behind the steering wheel is a 7-inch digital instrumentation and we also observe a screen in the center console.
A first for Toyota: the bZ4X will be the brand’s first car to be available with steer-by-wire technology. In theory, there is no longer a physical steering rod that links the steering wheel to the rest of the steering system.
Relevance
The bZ4X is the long-awaited first real battery-electric passenger car from Toyota in Europe, so it is a very important model for the brand. The bZ4X does not keep the empire to itself for long only within Toyota. Until 2025, Toyota will launch seven electric bZ models. In Europe, about ten percent of all Toyotas sold must be completely emission-free (electric or hydrogen) by 2025. Although the bZ4X is Toyota’s first ‘conventional’ electric passenger car in Europe, the SUV is not so outside the European borders. Toyota-GAC already supplies an electric C-HR in China, and Toyota has produced a series of electric units of both the first and second generation RAV4 in the United States.
On December 2, Toyota will present the European version of the bZ4X, then we also expect to be able to report more concrete figures.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl