We’ll See the New Toyota RAV4 EV Soon

Interesting....I think by borrowing tech from Tesla will help them pass GM's Volt in the race for a viable EV....

By Chuck Squatriglia

They are keeping very, very busy at Toyota, where engineers are frantically developing the RAV4 EV and the brass promise to deliver the plug-in Prius and a slew of new hybrids within two years.

The most tantalizing tidbit was a tweet saying the new RAV4 EV makes its worldwide debut at the Los Angeles auto show in November. Not much else was said — Toyota’s tweeter only had 140 characters to work with, of course, and he or she really needs to work on brevity. But Toyota executive vp Takeshi Uchiyamada said the RAV4 EV will roll into showrooms in 2012, about the same time we’ll see the plug-in Prius.

The timing suggests Toyota has been working frantically on the EV it announced in July. The car is being developed with some help from Tesla Motors, which is providing batteries, motors and other tech to help jump-start the program. Big push aside, don’t look for Toyota to go nuts with electrics. Uchiyamada says cars with cords will comprise but a small part of the fleet.

“Based on the current battery technology, it is not feasible to have all-electric vehicles” for the entire fleet, he said during a presentation in Detroit, according to the Wall Street Journal. “As battery technology gets better, that transition will lead to more pure electronic vehicles. Liquid fuels are still a superior fuel because of their energy density.”

As for the Toyota-Tesla partnership, Uchiyamada told reporters Toyota can be “slow” to innovate and tapping Tesla allows it to work “in a much quicker way” as it makes a prototype electric version of its RAV4 cute-ute (pictured).

The plug-in Prius rolls into North American showrooms in the “May/June 2012 time frame” and the goal is to sell 20,000 of them, Toyota said in another tweet. That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things — the company sold 356,824 Camrys last year — but it’s twice the number of Chevrolet Volts that GM will build next year.

As if that weren’t enough, said the company also will roll out six new hybrids by 2012. Two will wear the Lexus badge, and they’ll be new models — not hybrid versions of existing vehicles.

Source (pic from Jalopnik);
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/09/rav4-ev-la-auto-show/