Toyota taps Le Mans in bid to rival Tesla

TOKYO: Toyota sees the grueling conditions of the Le Mans 24hour endurance race as the ideal testing ground in its quest to build electrified cars rivaling those of Tesla.

Toyota unveiled a prototype sports car yesterday that’s born from hybrid technology developed at the FIA World Endurance Championship.

Legacy carmakers such as Toyota are working to keep cars sporty as industry trends toward self-driving and ride-sharing threaten to turn vehicles into utilitarian people-movers and render their manufacturers as hardware assemblers.

Toyota president Akio Toyoda, 61, expressed a desire last month to build a hybrid sports model based on the TS050 Le Mans racer as part of that push.

For Toyota, the race to develop fun-to-drive electric cars has been made more urgent by its commitment to offer an electrified option for every vehicle in its lineup by 2025.

It will be no easy feat to build engaging electrified autos, said Toyoda at a briefing last month, even as he lauded Tesla’s original 2008 Roadster as successfully creating brand value for an electric vehicle.

Hybrid endurance racing, particularly the 24 hours of Le Mans, “represent the optimal proving ground for achieving the goal of making cars fun for the next 100 years,” said Toyoda, himself an amateur race-car driver, in a statement on December 19. Bloomberg