Toyota Teases Tacoma Tailgate

Awesome alliteration aside, this is the best (official) look we’ve seen so far of the upcoming Toyota Tacoma. Thanks to the brand’s glacier-like design cycle, it’ll be the first new Tacoma is ages – and all signs point to a hybrid powertrain under the hood.

We hope you like the photo shown above because that’s all you’ll get for now. As the best-selling midsize pickup truck in North America, the Tacoma is likely to be one of the Big T’s most important introductions this year – at least so far as our market is concerned. It is expected to wear clothes similar to those donned by big-brother Tundra, including headlights of a similar design and grille options which include an off-road light bar stuffed into it for good measure. Here, we see Tundra's influence in the taillights, ones which span almost all the way down to the truck’s bumper with no body color panel at its terminus.

Speculation was running wild that this Tacoma would be available with a hybrid powertrain, and it seems those natterings were accurate. A nifty ‘i-Force Max’ badge appears on this teaser truck’s tailgate, along with a reference in the accompanying two-line bumf about ‘electrifying’ performance. Har-har, Toyota. Logic dictates there will be a pair of engine options, both of similar displacement but one appended with hybrid gubbins. Again, this is similar to the Tundra but look for four cylinders in the Tacoma instead of the six which appear in the larger truck.

Platform guts are expected to be shared between this midsizer and the half-ton, but that doesn’t mean they’ll end up being the same size. Like tailors who make differently sized clothes out of the same cloth, Toyota is bent on crafting a couple of trucks out of the same bones – a decision which is surely welcomed by pissant beancounters in the company.

When will the whole thing be revealed? With several of its competitors either fresh out of the restyle booth or set to emerge this year, we shouldn’t have long to wait.

[Image: Toyota]

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