Toyota FT-EV Concept debuts at Detroit Auto Show

Posted on January 11th, 2009 by Robert Adams | Posted under: Electric cars, Future/Concept, Toyota

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Toyota moves forward in it’s aspiration of making this world cleaner. New Prius is coming to showrooms very soon and the Lexus twin version is not far away as well. Making more hybrid cars than anybody else is not enough obviously, and Toyota pays all attention to plug-in electric cars.

FT-EV concept makes debut in Detroit these days and the production car is scheduled for 2012. Future FT-EV is based on Toyota’s smallest model called IQ, which itself is a tiny city-hatch that originally offers unique 3+1 seat concept.

This is a question if the production electric vehicle will have more than 2 seats as they have to fit batteries somewhere and most kindly will have to sacrifice those 1.5 seats in the back. The FT-EV concept looks like a 2-seat vehicle.

The core idea is to make a pure electric car that runs some 50 miles (80 kilometres) on fully loaded batteries, which should be enough for a daily city drive. Until then Toyota is running a plug-in hybrid vehicle program and prepares a special plug-in Prius version. Five hundred of these plug-in Priuses will be leased later this year to the customers across the planet as a part of test work on new technologies. The point is to test both plug-in technologies combined with lithium-ion batteries. Toyota and Panasonic make those batteries on their joint venture battery plant. If everything goes right, then we’ll see the production battery electric vehicle (BEV) in pre-scheduled 2012. It will be silent, not cheap and heavier of a petrol IQ version and less roomier.