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Toyota Motor Corp. is looking at rolling out a new manufacturing platform designed specifically for electric vehicles, part of revamped efforts to find the formula for making a large number of EVs profitably.
The Japanese car company
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is considering a platform—a common foundation on which various car models can be built—that is different from the one underpinning the auto maker’s current EVs, Toyota President Akio Toyoda said.
“EVs need to be thought of independently,” Toyoda said. Instead of converting existing vehicles into EVs, “the movement has shifted toward making EVs as EVs and making them properly good cars,” he told The Wall Street Journal while touring a car show near Tokyo on Friday.
A new EV-specific platform would represent a significant step up in investment from Toyota’s current EV architecture, which is partially repurposed from an existing design for gasoline-powered vehicles. A new platform composed of EV-optimized, standardized parts could help drive up volumes, bringing cost savings in the long term.
An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.
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