Toyota Rhombus – a brave new world

Unlike the Nissan Proto, the Toyota Rhombus concept is squarely aimed at changing the current style of vehicle. The exterior looks like something from the whacky races.

Toyota Rhombus

There are huge pods as the front that protrude out like the cheeks of trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. The windscreen starts at the front of the vehicle and bulgers back to an A pillar in line with the steering wheel, which is in the centre of the car making only one front seat, obviously for the driver.

The main body is an elongated oval so there is only one seat at the very back but two small seats facing inward in the middle creating a lounge room pit style area.

The RHOMBUS is a battery electric vehicle concept car developed by TMEC, Toyota’s base for R&D in China.

The word Rhombus suggests a derivation not from an oval but from a square that is leaning over. In geometric terms a rhombus has equal length sides and opposite sides are parallel.  For this reason, it is sometimes called a diamond.

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Toyota said it plans to roll out more than 10 battery electric vehicle models globally in the next five or six years, with a sales target of more than 5.5 million electrified vehicles worldwide by 2030.

When the vehicle was first muted it was suggested that it could be a taxicab in Europe by 2021 but that was before COVID struck

In a move that highlights how old some motoring enthusiasts are getting and how the future is in the younger generations Toyota has said that the RHOMBUS aims to suit the values and lifestyles of drivers born after 1990.

Some years ago, Toyota had a top-down directive that they would no longer build boring cars.  In saying this they accepted that this would mean that some people would like the deigns and some would definitely not like them. Based on the response at the Chicago Motor Show and on social media, the Rhmobus has achieved this result.

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