Yahoo Autos Everyone Keeps Looking at the Toyota bZ4X
I’ve never driven a car that attracted as much attention as the impossibly-named Toyota bZ4X. It wasn’t merely idle interest either – a few months after it went on sale, there are four within a few blocks of my home. I’m not sure there is an EV with more blunt goodwill and momentum than this thing.
It’s an appealing car, at least on paper. Its 71.4-kWh battery pack gets a claimed 242 or 252 miles of range, depending on the trim, not far off the 266 claimed on the Hyundai Ioniq5 with the 77.4-kWh long-range battery. Both vehicles start in the low $40,000 range and make do without the biggest of tax breaks reserved for American EVs these days. The Toyota is a much bigger and more grown car than the Bolt or Bolt EUV, and you can buy one now, unlike the stop-sale'd Blazer and upcoming Honda Prologue.
Sitting inside the bZ4X also brings some charm. More so than a Mustang Mach-E or VW ID4, it feels adult inside. It is futuristic in scale if not detail. It’s all regular Toyota features in here, just roomier and airier. The BMW iX has a similar quality. (The iX also has more crystals inside, which may or may not be a good thing.) We are well above Corolla in this car. We are in the echelons of well-made Toyota, at least in terms of what you touch and see and feel.
Driving in the real world, however, the bZ4X reveals itself to be desperately behind its rivals at Hyundai and Kia. Published range figures might be similar, but the Toyota charges like it’s drinking soup with a teaspoon. Worse, that range estimate is all-but-impossible to meet. The moment I turned on the air conditioning, fully 40 miles of range disappeared in a single slurp.
That the bZ4X has a nice ride, and that it is quiet and refined, comfortable and easy around town vanishes from your mind the moment you see that range drop. What is wrong with this car? What is wrong with Toyota, unimpeachable Toyota? How could this happen?
Part of this does come down to easily-digested specs. While Hyundai heavily invested in EVs and builds its new cars on 800-volt architecture – the same kind of thing you get on a six-figure Porsche Taycan – Toyota let the bZ4X out the door with a 355-volt system. It’s less efficient. It can’t charge as quickly, and it more easily exhausts what battery capacity it has.
The other part is that Toyota seemingly has no great desire to beat Hyundai and Kia. Sure, the Korean automakers have put more money into EV development and are functionally a generation ahead of where Toyota stands in the here and now. But EVs are still a sliver of the car market. Hybrids are where there is profit to be made at the moment, and Toyota is selling so many that it's beating its own profit expectations.
For Toyota as a company, the bZ4X is perfectly fine. It doesn't need to be the best EV on sale right now. Even if it was, there's only so many Toyota could ever sell. Plus Subaru, which sells its version as the Solterra.
For the consumer? Part of me wonders if it might be as well.
After all, is it so important to me that the bZ4X is less able to gulp down huge amounts of electricity at ultra-fast chargers? How often do I take the five- or six-hour road trips that even necessitate them? Isn’t it enough for me to let the car slowly and reasonably charge overnight? Though the Ioniq5 is what I might call a stroke of design genius, an instantly iconic neoretro box, isn’t the bZ4X also weird and handsome? Don’t I like the way that light bends on its concave face, a perpetual and bug-like frown? Maybe these attributes are plenty. Maybe the sterling reputation of Toyota is good, and fine, and a suitable equalizer to the transparent betterness and sophistication of the Hyundai. For the majority of my neighborhood, otherwise stuffed with Camry taxis and RAV4s and Venzas (I count three Toyotas out my window right now), it certainly seems to be.
Every time I walk past my local bZ4Xs I peer into those HID eyes and wonder: what am I missing? What is it that people see in this car? This mainstream missive in a bright, sharp, cutting EV field? All of the cab drivers in my quiet Brooklyn neighborhood could be so much more stylish in Ioniqs and EV6s. But maybe I’m looking too hard at the bZ4X. Maybe this level of good, right now, is good enough.
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