It only depicts a silhouetted truck on rocky ground set against the night sky, but we’re confident that this photo is our first official peek at the new 2024 Toyota Tacoma. This hotly-anticipated truck is set for a dramatic redesign and, while this teaser shot doesn’t reveal much, it does show that the new Taco is getting a big injection of Tundra energy going forward.
What do we mean? The Tacoma appears to be getting some of the same square-ishness that its bigger brother the full-size Tundra pickup received during its 2022 model year changeover. We also see that the rear of the cab gets a small spoiler and the tailgate appears to get the same aerodynamic extension as the Tundra to help make the mid-size Tacoma pickup slip through the air better.
We tried to adjust the image to see if we couldn’t eke out more detail, even from an image that gets garbled by Instagram’s coding. But Toyota seems to have planned for that trick, and no fussing with brightness or contrast changed the pickup’s shadowed visage. Still, the new styling cues are obvious and line up with the Brazilian patent images we saw earlier this year, as well as our artist’s renderings of what the next-gen Tacoma could look like and some spy shots of the new truck testing, in which it appears as though the new Tacoma is trying out a new hybrid powertrain option.
To wit, we’re expecting the 2024 Tacoma to have an electrified 2.4-liter turbocharged I-4, just like the 2023 Lexus NX350 hybrid, but mounted in a longitudinal layout. The Tacoma is still a “proper truck” with a body-on-frame architecture and rear- and four-wheel drive options, after all. We also expect Toyota will offer a full-electric version, but that timeline for the BEV Taco hasn’t been confirmed by the brand. If it comes at all, it will most likely be late in 2024 or early 2025.
Source: Read Full Article