Only 100 Toyota iQs will ever exist

The Toyota iQ city car – known as the Scion in North America – was specifically designed to be used in urban environments. This is because it is a purely electric vehicle, and as opposed to hybrids or the more traditional internal-combustion engine models, pure EVs don’t have that much versatility if you take them out of the city.
Prototypes of the iQ were displayed at both the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show as well as this year’s Geneva Auto Show, but the Japanese carmaker has recently revealed the plug-in all-electric variant however they will never introduce it into full production.
Toyota have revised the original plans which initially said that the iQ would see full production because the limited range of the EV and the lack of infrastructure would mean very poor sales, so they choose to focus on hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle models for the coming future.
The fact of the matter is – in Toyota vice chairman’s view – that current electric vehicles simply cannot meet the needs of customers, whether we’re talking about their range, their cost or their charging time, so this is why Toyota will be concentrating on making hybrids and will only produce 100 units of the iQ to be sold only in Japan and the U.S.
The iQ will be powered by Toyota’s new Hybrid Synergy Drive which is made up of an electric motor capable of generating 47KW or 63HP and 163 Nm of torque, a battery pack, a 3kW water-cooled battery charger, a converter, an inverter, a motor speed reduction mechanism and a regenerative braking system.
The car’s aerodynamics have been optimized to reduce energy consumption with air inlets having been reduced to a minimum and the bonnet being redesigned to optimize airflow, and the underbody covers the whole belly of the car thus improving aerodynamic efficiency further. The overall body construction was also modified in order to deal with the increased weight of an electric power train and battery pack; the body construction makes use of high tensile sheet steel.
It sounds like a really interesting vehicle, too bad it won’t be seeing a larger number of units, maybe sometime in the future, they will be able to use what they’ve learned and developed for the iQ for a mass produced model.