At the Media Briefing on Battery Electric Vehicle Strategies held on Tuesday, Toyota, a Japanese automotive manufacturer, released a fleet of 15 new electric vehicles, among which the bZ SDN concept car will be the first pure electric vehicle built by Toyota and BYD together. Its mass-production version is expected to debut at Auto China, which will be in April of next year, and will be put on sale before the end of 2022.
Among these new cars released by the company, there are as many as 11 electric vehicles belonging to the Toyota brand, while its other brand, Lexus, has 4 new models, including a SUV, sedan, sports car, pickup truck and other market segments. All of the new cars are concept cars based on the premise of coming to market, but it is expected that they will be on sale one after another in the near future.
Toyota bZ SDN concept vehicle is positioned as a pure electric medium-sized vehicle, and its design draws lessons from the some of Toyota’s bZ4X other concept cars. The mass-production version released in the future will adopt the ferrous lithium phosphate blade battery technology from BYD, and it may be priced less than 200,000 yuan ($31,420).
On July 19, 2019, BYD signed a contract with the company, and both parties will jointly develop a pure electric sedan and a pure electric vehicle version of low-chassis SUVs, as well as the power cells needed for these products. Future models of two parties will use the Toyota brand and are planned to be launched in China by 2025.
On March 25, 2020, BYD Toyota EV Technology Co., Ltd. was formally established and registered in Pingshan District, Shenzhen, with a registered capital of 345 million yuan. Its legal representative is Zhao Binggen, Manager of the General Department of BYD Automotive Research Institute, and its Chairman is Hirohisa Kishi, President of Powertrain Company in the firm. Each party hold 50% of the shares, and its subscribed capital is 172.5 million yuan ($27.099 million).
At the press conference, the company also announced that it will invest 35 billion US dollars in the R&D of electric vehicles, and put forward a plan to achieve an annual sales target of 3.5 million electric vehicles by 2030. Akio Toyoda, chairman of the firm, said that by 2030, Toyota and its Lexus brands will roll out 30 pure electric vehicle models. In addition, the Lexus brand will stop selling petrol vehicles by 2035.