Toyota’s First Electric Sports Car Takes Shape Under GR Badge

Over the past couple of years, Toyota’s racing and customizing arm, collectively known as Gazoo Racing (or GR for short), has been busy launching an increasing number of sports models.

It all started on the international stage with the GR Supra of 2019, then the multi-award winning GR Yaris of 2020, followed by the GR86, and the just-launched GR Corolla. Now, we are hearing news from Japan’s biggest-selling car magazine, Best Car, that Gazoo Racing will be debuting the brand’s first-ever fully electric sports car by 2026.

Expected to measure in at around the same size as a Supra, the GR EV sports car will pack 500-hp in its all-solid state battery pack while employing the same e-TNGA platform as the recently released bZ4X electric SUV. According to the report, the two-door will incorporate a 4WD system with an electric motor attached to each axle.

We know cars like this EV sports model are coming because in December last year, Toyota CEO, Akio Toyoda, announced a plan to launch some 30 new battery EVs by 2030, including sedans, SUVs and sports cars. The company also promised to sell 3.5 million battery EVs globally by 2030 and to transfer Lexus into an EV-only brand by 2035.

Toyota, of course, might have been the pioneer of hybrid cars back in 1997 with the game-changing Prius, a car that forced every other carmaker to add electric motors to their vehicles, but Japan’s biggest car brand has been conspicuously late to the EV party having only just debuted its first EV, the bZ4X this year.

In addition to this EV coupe, Best Car is also reporting that there is strong speculation that Toyota and Mazda are collaborating on an EV sports car that could become the next-generation RX-7. We have seen concept cars like the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Mazda RX-Vision, introduced back in 2015, so we know that the Hiroshima-based automaker is seriously considering how to move forward with its signature rotary engine technology. Whether that engine will be married to a plug-in hybrid system, or hydrogen powered unit, or whether, like Porsche did with its ‘Turbo S’ name—on the Taycan that has no combustion engine, Mazda will keep its famous ‘rotary’ name even without a rotary engine remains to be seen.