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 — instead, the company reconsiders what one might use a vehicle for. Why should a car just be a thing you drive to work every day? Why not a way to carry plenty of passengers, mobility aids included? Why not a place to serve food? Why not a theater to watch the New York Liberty whoop the Phoenix Mercury out on the court? Or, how about all of those in one car?
Enter the latest version of the e-Palette, a microbus meant to do a little bit of everything that is now available to customers. Toyota wants it to be a people-carrier, a food truck, a theater, and more — all in the same day. Rather than a pallet, a flat platform for carrying things, Toyota wants this to be an artist’s palette: the source of all your paints, the most basic thing that an artist needs. Pretentious for a bus? Absolutely, but it may not be inaccurate. At least, depending on the interior accessories Toyota ends up offering.
On the inside
The default interior option from Toyota is this, a bus-like layout with folding seats along the side and fixed chairs in back. The prior generation e-Palette primarily saw use shuttling Olympic athletes around the village (and occasionally hitting them), so starting with this layout makes sense — it’s likely to be the most-used option of the many Toyota suggests. Its use with paralympians also makes sense for the bus’s low floor height and numerous accessibility accomodations, from ramps at the entrance to an optional wheelchair latch in the floor. That default layout fits 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 slightly longer than a Camry. At nearly 82 inches wide, it’s two inches wider than the Sequoia, and its 102-inch height puts everything else in 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 less 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 within Toyota’s intended use environments of the Woven City and the area surrounding Toyota Arena in Tokyo.
Room to play with
For navigation within those cities, Toyota offers a semi-autonomous upgrade package for the e-Palette. The company says it’s a Level 2 system for now, but the upgrade kit includes a full suite of LiDAR, camera, and sensor upgrades intended to bring the bus up to Level 4 autonomy in 2027. For now, though, it’ll require a human being at the wheel — or, rather, at the dumb little steer-by-wire yoke. At least the rest of the cockpit is interesting.
The e-Palette is not a vehicle for us lowly consumers, but a business-to-business play for Toyota to sell to other companies. It starts at nearly $197,000 in Japan, and that’s before any interior retrofit you’d need to turn it 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 certainly use the e-Palette, but that’s a lot of change for any other artists to drop on palettes of their own. But the company does say it’seligible for the Ministry of the Environment’s Commercial Vehicle Electrification Promotion Project, which offers a subsidy of over $100,000.
Toyota
