By KBC Associate 
Toyota is reportedly serious about offering a smaller, potentially car-based ute which would slot in under its existing pickups.
“We’re looking at it,” Toyota USA chief operating officer Mark Templin told Bloomberg.
“We could really do well in that segment, so we’re trying to do it,” said Cooper Ericksen, a senior vice president in charge of planning and strategy at Toyota Motor North America, in a separate interview. “It’s a matter of timing.”
It’s unclear whether Toyota’s more compact ute would have petrol, hybrid or electric power.
However, Bloomberg reports Toyota engineers were spied testing the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz – both car-based unibody utes, unlike Toyota’s body-on-frame Tacoma and HiLux – near its technical centre in the US state of Michigan last year.
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A smaller ute would slot into the company’s US lineup under the Tacoma, which replaced the HiLux – known there as the Pickup – back in 1995.
The current Tacoma is a newer vehicle than our HiLux, riding on the TNGA-F ladder platform that’s shared with models like the Prado and offering a turbocharged four-cylinder petrol-electric hybrid powertrain.
By launching rival for the Maverick (pictured above) and Santa Cruz, Toyota could offer US buyers a more affordable ute. While it may not have quite the level of off-road and towing capability as the HiLux or Tacoma, it could offer a more car-like driving experience.
The Hyundai Santa Cruz has been a fairly steady if not enormous seller in the US, with 32,033 sales last year, but sales of the Ford Maverick rose 39 per cent to exceed 100,000 annual units for the first time.
The final tally was 131,142 units, which pushed it well past the Ford Ranger. Ford sold 46,205 Rangers in the US in 2024, placing it third in its segment and well behind the top-selling Tacoma (pictured above), which posted 192,813 sales.
This mooted new Toyota ute would appear to be different to the HiLux Champ launched in Southeast Asia, which is a boxy, ladder-frame, more back-to-basics counterpart to the HiLux that undercuts it on price.
Toyota has also confirmed it’ll launch an electric ute in Europe by 2026, potentially pointing to a production version of the unibody EPU electric ute concept (above) revealed at the 2023 Tokyo motor show.
There have also been reports out of South America that Toyota will launch a car-based, hybrid-powered ute in Brazil in 2027 resembling the EPU concept.
Whether this vehicle will be a Latin American-only product – such as unibody utes like the Ram Rampage and Chevrolet Montana – or be additionally offered in North America and other markets remains unclear.