Running on 20-inch wheels, the bZ4X will have a choice of two power outputs, 201bhp with rear-wheel drive and 215bhp with four-wheel drive, along with a range of up to 280 miles with a 30-minute recharge to 80 per cent state of charge possible on a 150kW DC charger.

Toyota claims its experience in building more than 18 million petrol/electric hybrid cars over the last quarter century will enable it to engineer a pure BEV with great durability and it has backed that up with an unusual promise, guaranteeing that the bZ4X will maintain 90 per cent of its charge capacity over a decade and/or 62,000 miles – most car makers only guarantee 70 per cent of charge capacity for between seven or eight years. The proviso for Toyota owners is that you have to have the car inspected annually at a Toyota dealership.

To get round the problems of winter use, where valuable battery power is used to heat the interior, which ruins its driving range, the new car will use a heat pump to more efficiently heat the cabin, along with thermal insulation to retain that heat.

Infra-red heating

In addition, however, the bZ4X has a new infra-red radiant heating system, which warms front-seat passengers using a heat panel in the lower dashboard. The idea of using such electromagnetic panels is that they heat the passengers without wasting energy heating the air. It’s a technology which has been trialled by many car makers, including BMW as far back as 2015.

As Gill Pratt, chief executive of the Toyota Research Institute, explains: “It’s not the temperature of the air that determines how warm the occupants feel, it’s the temperature of their skin.” He uses the example of the frozen-food aisle in a supermarket, where the air temperature is the same as that in the rest of the supermarket, but the radiant temperature of the food is making shoppers feel chilly as it lowers the temperature of their skin.