Toyota loves experimenting with the mobility space. The automaker has given us moon buggies, mobility pods, personal transport robots, and what looks like a drivable shoe, but its latest concept doesn’t take such wild swings on the structure of a vehicle — as a substitute, the corporate reconsiders what one might use a vehicle for. Why should a automobile just be a thing you drive to work each day? Why not a strategy to carry loads of passengers, mobility aids included? Why not a spot to serve food? Why not a theater to look at the Latest York Liberty whoop the Phoenix Mercury out on the court? Or, how about all of those in a single automobile?
Enter the newest version of the e-Palette, a microbus meant to do a bit of little bit of every little thing that’s now available to customers. Toyota wants it to be a people-carrier, a food truck, a theater, and more — all in the identical day. Slightly than a pallet, a flat platform for carrying things, Toyota wants this to be an artist’s palette: the source of all of your paints, probably the most basic thing that an artist needs. Pretentious for a bus? Absolutely, however it will not be inaccurate. Not less than, depending on the inside accessories Toyota finally ends up offering.
On the within
The default interior option from Toyota is that this, a bus-like layout with folding seats along the side and glued chairs in back. The prior generation e-Palette primarily saw use shuttling Olympic athletes across the village (and infrequently hitting them), so starting with this layout is sensible — it’s prone to be the most-used option of the numerous Toyota suggests. Its use with paralympians also is sensible for the bus’s low floor height and various accessibility accomodations, from ramps at the doorway to an optional wheelchair latch in the ground. That default layout suits a claimed 17 occupants, which is an incredible number for the limited footprint the e-Palette has to work with.
Speaking of that footprint, at 194.9 inches long the Mobility e-Palette is barely longer than a Camry. At nearly 82 inches wide, it’s two inches wider than the Sequoia, and its 102-inch height puts every little thing else within the Toyota lineup to shame. Even amongst utility vehicles, it’s an oddity — shorter in length yet wider and taller than a Chevy Express van. Its electric drivetrain makes 200 horsepower and 196 lb-ft, topping out at lower than 50 miles per hour. Toyota claims just over 155 miles of range, making it undebatably a city mouse even with the claimed 40 minute time to fast-charge 80% of its 73 kWh battery at 90 kW. A tall, wide, stubby city mouse, which should fit nicely inside Toyota’s intended use environments of the Woven City and the world surrounding Toyota Arena in Tokyo.
Room to play with
For navigation inside those cities, Toyota offers a semi-autonomous upgrade package for the e-Palette. The corporate says it is a Level 2 system for now, however the upgrade kit features a full suite of LiDAR, camera, and sensor upgrades intended to bring the bus as much as Level 4 autonomy in 2027. For now, though, it’ll require a human being on the wheel — or, moderately, on the dumb little steer-by-wire yoke. Not less than the remainder of the cockpit is interesting.
The e-Palette will not be a vehicle for us lowly consumers, but a business-to-business play for Toyota to sell to other corporations. It starts at nearly $197,000 in Japan, and that is before any interior retrofit you’d must turn it right into a profit-generating food truck — there’s simply no way for a rideshare driver to run enough 17-passenger Uber Pools in a month that it covers the payment. Toyota will definitely use the e-Palette, but that is loads of change for another artists to drop on palettes of their very own. But the corporate does say it’seligible for the Ministry of the Environment’s Business Vehicle Electrification Promotion Project, which offers a subsidy of over $100,000.
Toyota
This Article First Appeared At www.jalopnik.com
