Toyota's Space Mobility Prototype Looks Rock-Crawler Ready

Image: Toyota

Toyota has been slow to the electric car uptake, but this new Space Mobility prototype—scheduled for unveiling at the Japan Mobility Show on October 27—is proving the company still knows how to engineer the best and coolest stuff out there.

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With four independently suspended, independently driven, and independently steered wheels, this buggy is ready to take on just about any terrain we can throw at it. Toyota says this little electric trucklet is built for safe and reliable driving on the moon and other extraterrestrial surfaces, but I think it’s perfectly at home bombing across the the deserts of the American southwest.

The Space Mobility Prototype is built explicitly with all-terrain driving in mind. Toyota says it can effortlessly navigate boulders up to 19 inches tall, and the vehicle can climb 25 degree slopes. That’s almost as severe as straight up the banking at Daytona International. I’m inclined to believe this would be an exquisite entrant in something like the King of the Hammers race without many modifications.

Toyota has been working with JAXA, Japan’s version of NASA, since 2019 on a pressurized lunar rover, and this is an extension of that research. While the so-called Lunar Cruiser is like a large mobile science van that would seat a handful of people and not require them to be suited up, this Space Mobility Prototype is a smaller offshoot, allowing moon folks to zip around in electric comfort with just a space suit between them and the vast emptiness.

Honestly, slap a set of headlights, tail lights, and turn signals on this bad boy and I’m finding a way to get it street registered—clean Florida title—and daily driven. It’s just the right size for off-road buggying, and doesn’t appear to carry a ton of extra battery weight. With four wheel independent steer and independent propulsion, you could theoretically turn this car on its own axis, which just seems cool to me. In a utopian space community, everyone drives these on the moon. In my utopian ideal society, I drive one of these on Earth.