Toyota Corolla Concept Hints At Striking Future For Global Best-Seller

The Toyota Corolla Concept is far from the most exciting concept car that’s been revealed at this year’s Tokyo Motor Show, but it’s almost certainly the most important. As any car bore worth their salt will tell you, the Corolla is the most successful nameplate in automotive history, with well over 50 million of them having found homes around the world across 12 generations since 1966.

Ahead of the name’s 60th anniversary, then, this striking concept gives us a taste of what we can expect from a future Corolla. The next generation? Maybe not. But the one after that? Perhaps.

While it sticks to a fairly traditional small saloon silhouette, everything else about the Corolla Concept is fairly wildly different to what’s come before, looking more like what we’d expect from a future Prius than a Corolla.

It gets a dramatically rising beltline and a huge windscreen that fills the cabin with light, full-width lightbars front and rear and bodywork full of slashes and angles. It’s a minimalist affair inside, with a floating centre console and fully digital wraparound instrument display.

The Tokyo show car features a charging port at the front, hinting at either fully electric or plug-in hybrid power. As we’ve come to expect from the company, though, Toyota’s keeping its options very open with regards to future Corolla powertrains. At his presentation at the motor show, Toyota CEO Koji Sato said that the company wants to retain the Corolla’s global appeal, and as such, future iterations could be offered as full EVs, pure internal combustion cars and pretty much everything in between, depending on market and regulations.

As for when – or if – we could see a Corolla a bit like this one on the roads, we don’t know. The current 12th-gen car has been around since 2018, so is reaching the end of the typical lifecycle of a car, but Toyota’s keeping its cards close to its chest regarding a potential replacement, and with a fresh UK production line for the hot GR version opening next year, it’s still likely got some life in it yet. If we one day get a Corolla that looks like this, though, we might be a bit more inclined to pay attention to the ones that don’t have a Gazoo Racing badge.