Toyota's Next Electric SUV Is Hiding Under This Sliced And Diced Corolla Cross
The heavily modified "Franken-mule" reveals that Toyota is secretly testing a new, smaller electric platform beneath recycled sheet metal.
Yesterday Toyota revealed its next generation vehicle architecture that works with EVs and hybrids. And today it looks like we might have got our first peek at it. We've got some spy shots of what at first glance looks like a prototype for an updated Corolla Cross. But all is not as it appears.
The headlights are wrong, for a start, but that's far from the only suspicious detail. Because the wheelbase is also off. It's much shorter than the real Corolla Cross's 103.9 in (2,640 mm) wheelbase. And then there's the lack of exhaust tailpipes, and the frame visible under the floorpan.
So is Toyota making an EV version of the Corolla Cross? Not out of the current SUV, which went on sale in North America in late 2021, and was facelifted for MY26. The car we're looking at is a what automaker's call a mule, a prototype made by butchering an existing model, because it's too early in the development process for real prototypes to be ready for the road.
Hybrids and EVs on one platform
Our hunch says this camouflaged SUV is testing the new "multi pathway" platform Toyota confirmed earlier this week. Almost all of today's unibody passenger cars and SUVs, including the real Corolla Cross, ride on some form of the automaker's TNGA platform. But the e-TNGA variant for models like the electric bZ is substantially different from the straight TNGA one used in combustion and hybrid cars like the Corolla sedan, and its Cross SUV brother. The new platform will change that.
Instead of developing different cars and platforms for each powertrain type, Toyota wants one set of hardware to handle everything, opening the door to the first ever Corolla EV. The shift will streamline Toyota's development and production process, making it easier for plants to flex the production volumes for different powertrains when customer demand shifts from one to another.
Toyota says no one powertrain will be compromised for the sake of another, and that hybrid and plug-in hybrid models will drink 15 percent less fuel. They'll use a new 1.5L inline-3 engine that replaces both the 1.5L three and 1.8L inline-4 engines Toyota currently relies. The new engines and platform hit the road next year, but we can expect plenty more spy shot sightings before they do.