Toyota's first electric sports car aimed to be indistinguishable from a gasoline one

Despite all the strides made by electric vehicles in the last decade, there’s still one category where they’re sorely lacking: the affordable EV sports car. We’ve seen sedans, SUVs, supercars, and even pickup trucks, but there’s yet to be an EV that drives like a Miata. That could be changing, as a new report from the U.K. suggests that Toyota is working on an electric performance prototype worthy of the GR badge.

At the recent 24 Hours of Le Mans, Autocar spoke to Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s recently retired president and grandson of the company’s founder, and says he is still taking an active role in developing the EV sports car. Toyoda, a known enthusiast that has driven some of Toyota’s race cars at endurance and rally competitions around the world, says that he wants his performance EVs to be almost indistinguishable from their gasoline counterparts.

“The starting point is not what powertrain the car has, but how fun it is to drive regardless of that powertrain,” Toyoda revealed to Autocar. “I actually had the opportunity to test drive a BEV GR we are working on recently. I don’t know if that car will make it onto the market yet, but the first priority of making these kinds of cars is that they need to be fun to drive, no matter what powertrain they use.”

The driving experience will be bolstered with engine sounds piped into the cabin, as well as the EV manual transmission and three-pedal setup that Toyota has been working on. The stick shift is said to be so realistic that it can even roll backwards or stall. “If you put someone in the car and asked them to drive it and guess the powertrain, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you,” Toyoda said of the prototype.

Toyoda did say that the car would look like a modern EV. That could mean design cues like the lack of a grille.

Toyoda has been adamant about preserving the “fun to drive” aspect of cars as the industry moves into a new era of green energy, almost to a fault. It’s why the company has been experimenting with hydrogen-combustion race cars and other carbon neutral alternatives to the point where Toyoda himself was nearly voted out of his chairmanship. He has since managed to retain the position.

Toyoda perhaps also has a vested interest in seeing the GR EV succeed. Toyoda himself founded Gazoo when he was a junior executive at the company and has taken it to an entire performance sub-brand and motorsports program. Rumors have pointed to a potential EV using a mid-engined layout being co-developed with Toyota partners Daihatsu and Suzuki, but Toyoda didn’t disclose details and still hedges.

“Whether it makes it to the market or not,” he said in the interview, “What the company is trying to do is explore the idea of what it is that we shouldn’t lose in a car even if it becomes BEV.”