Subaru’s first electric car revealed, looks just like Toyota cousin

Several months ago Subaru teased the looks of its new first fully electric car; a mid-size SUV built on the same new platform as Toyota’s bZ4x Concept. The duo share plenty of components and, looking at those early teaser pictures, we expected them to look somewhat similar. But, maybe not quite this similar.

Overnight Subaru issued a series of teaser images for its fully electric Solterra SUV, including one image that effectively gives us a full front three-quarter view of the model.

The images show that the Solterra shares more than a silhouette with the bZ4x. The extended wheel arches, the intricate headlight and tail light shapes, the bodywork’s surfacing … all of it appears to be more or less identical between the two models.

There appears to be a handful of mild differences. The black wheel arch extensions appear to be a matte finish on the Solterra, while on the bZ4x they’re a gloss finish. The Solterra also appears to have a different headlight cluster layout.

Among the few areas not shown off in the images is the front grille area, which appears blacked out in the lead image. Here there might be some slight differences to touch on when the model eventually gets revealed in full.

What makes things a little intriguing is that while the bZ4x as we know it is labelled merely as a ‘concept’, the Solterra that’s being teased is a production car.

At the time of the bZ4x’s launch, we noted that the model appeared to be more or less production ready. The Solterra gives us perhaps our best indication yet that the production version of the bZ4x will feature very few changes

Subaru has yet to confirm any of the Solterra’s mechanical details, like motor or battery size. It’s expected that it and the production version of the bZ4x will feature the same powertrain and battery options.

On top of the exterior pictures, Subaru has also shown off the Solterra’s cabin. It too appears to be a copy and paste job of the bZ4x’s innards, although there’s not much wrong with that given how neat and modern everything looks inside.

The protruding central touchscreen cascades down the centre of the car to form the central control stack, featuring what appears to be a dial-based drive-mode selector and what we hope is an air conditioning adjustment section made up of physical buttons. Even the steering wheels are the same.

Given that the Solterra is set to hit showrooms in certain markets in 2022, we expect it to be unveiled in full later this year.