The Toyota IQ has been named 2007 Concept of the Year.
Toyota resisted the temptation to give its IQ a precise score, confident that it would leapfrog all its competitors to breeze into the top mini car slot.
Just ask any car designer or engineer which products are hardest to build: they will all agree that small cars are the cause of the biggest design headaches for various reasons. Small city car means budgets are tight, space is tight too with the need to squeeze bodies and baggage into a cramped city-friendly footprint; and small cars must be cheap to run and repair as well.
So when the world's most successful car-maker focuses its considerable talents on a new small car, everyone would be expecting clever solutions and not just another conventional small car built down to a price.
Toyota has not let anyone down as the IQ delivers in spades, Car magazine reckons it's the most significant small car since the original Smart in 1997.
The IQ is breathtakingly small - at a city-friendly 2,980mm long it is as tall and wide as a Yaris. It's the packaging within this diminutive frame that impresses the most.
The IQ can seat four and it's likely to become the first production car to feature an innovative 3+1 (three passengers at the front and one at the back) format. The dashboard is cut away in front of the passenger, letting them slide the seat forward to create more legroom for an adult behind. This sort of clever thinking permeates the Toyota IQ.
Toyota engineers managed to squeeze so much space into such a small container by taking inspiration from mobile phones and consumer electronics where miniaturisation is the name of the game. Modern cars nowadays are unwieldy constructs, with bulky air-con modules and prop shafts and suspension units all getting in the way of occupants. Toyota went back to the drawing board and shrunk and moved as many components as it could.
The heating and ventilation system is dramatically smaller than on conventional cars, with the result that it slots under the dashboard, making the centre console and dash thinner than normal, thus making room for that 3+1 layout. The fuel tank has been repositioned and flattened to be as compact as possible, too.
Toyota calls this new philosophy the "Integrated Component Architecture", a philosophy that places function at par with styling. The IQ will be front-wheel drive, and Toyota talks of repeating the engineering simplicity that inspired the Aygo.
Following in the footsteps of previous Toyota models like the Aygo, Yaris and Auris, the styling of the IQ is as modern as possible. Toyota's designers did not dip in the history books and the IQ's styling is uniquely high-tech look.
Concept of the Year Toyota IQ is uniquely high tech.