“bZ Time Attack Concept”: SEMA Build Episode 1 | Toyota
Hey, it’s that time of the year again. We’re getting prepared for the 2025 SEMA show. So, we just arrived to the facility
where a lot of ex-show vehicles end up so that they can be in storage
for when they’re reused. Nowadays, technology moves so much faster. It’s smarter. And this year at SEMA, we’re gonna go fully electric for the first time. Oh yeah. 2026 Toyota bZ. Next stop is we’re going to take
this vehicle over to the lift. Brad and I will throw our arms
around it, have a look at it, and try and figure out what direction to go next. Really flat on the bottom, which is cool. Definitely a flat face, huh? Do you think we’ll be able to
get a 9-10in wheel on this thing? I think so. I mean, I think
if we can come out some. Oh, yeah. Let’s come out. Bring that out. Yeah, I
think we got room for brakes. Do you want to, do you want to look under the hood and see how much room we
have to work with in there? That is a massive inverter. I mean, it looks clean actually under the hood. I’m a little bit more surprised than
what I thought it was going to look like. Well, I think we’ve seen enough, right? Everything points at the fact
that a Toyota bZ electric car is a great platform for a time attack vehicle. Every year for SEMA, we really do our best to try and outdo ourselves from the year before. And sometimes it’s a real challenge. And this is going to be another one of those years because no one on the team really is
an expert on battery electric vehicles. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at
the vehicle itself, the fun part starts and that is when we start getting creative. And so I sat down with Barry who
does a lot of our renderings. So we started talking. He put together.. I sent him a picture of a stock bZ and he started going to town on it. He starts with a pad and paper and a pencil. But you can see where we get some of the ideas for the wider stance, the wider fender. So then we go over here to maybe this right here. Some little side skirts. There’s
the splitter in the front and a diffuser coming off the back. So then we start mixing the two up to something more like that. We’ll probably the diffuser will be a little
bit different than what he’s got going on here. The wing’s going to be different. And once we get to a point where
it looks stylish and looks good, Brad and Justin will start making
that magic happen on the car itself. When the car first got here,
one of the first things we did was we know we were putting a cage in it. We had David over there just
basically gut the whole interior. So to cut down the amount of
weight that we have in this thing, we’ve stripped out the interior as much as we can while keeping the functionality of the vehicle. So we pulled out all the seats,
we pulled out all the carpeting, we pulled out all the panels, the airbags,
anything that we can that’s non-essential. So we just took the glass off the top. One, for safety, two, this makes it
way easier to get our cage in and out. We’ll be able to create a splitter off the front which we can hand build here in house. Obviously, you can see that we’re
using this big old sheet of plywood. One, it’s cheap. It gives us
all our holes and locations, but yet it still gives us the same feel and
shape of what the splitter is going to look like. So, we actually just received
the wheel today from BBS, and they call it the BBS Unlimited. And what it allows you to do is really
fine-tune the fitment on a custom bodywork car. Obviously, this is kind of the
tire size that we wanna run. And as you can see, it’s about
2 to 2.5 in outside the fender. So, we’re looking at, you know, bringing a
mold or or something down to cover the fender. We’re widening the car about 3 in. And we wanted the fenders to
retain their original shape. So when we decided to make our
own fenders or fender flares, the guys came up with a expanding foam that they could lay on there
and then shape relatively easily and it’s strong enough that you can
actually sand on it, bondo on top of it. And then we can bring Cole in to scan it and turn it into an STL file which will then allow us to 3D
print an actual physical part. So, I’m going to scan what the
motorsports guys have created, and then I’m going to scan the other side
of the vehicle, which is all original still, so that we can get all the
mounting points and pickups. And that’ll let us essentially
digitally recreate this entire car. With this BZ, our hope is we can find a good car to do really
impressive time attack races with, but also be able to repurpose it and
do some hill climb events with it also. The big issue is batteries and keeping the
power all the way to the top of the hill, and that is what we will work on. Is to find that perfect sweet spot to be able to make a vehicle that’s
very, very fast on a single lap, but also can be toned down potentially to be
able to handle 10 minutes of uphill hard driving at 10/10 the whole way.
Watch as the Motorsports Garage team ventures into uncharted territory with the bZ Time Attack Concept, transforming Toyota’s electric platform into a purpose-built racing machine. Through radical 3D-printed aerodynamics and race-bred engineering, the build pushes BEV technology to its limits, creating an all-electric weapon ready to conquer both time attack circuits and hill climbs.
00:00 Getting prepared for the 2025 SEMA Show
00:53 Inspecting the vehicle & choosing a direction
01:50 Past SEMA Iterations
02:06 The Toyota team gets creative: Sketches and Concept Art
03:06 Taking the bZ Apart: Stripping the interior
03:35 Hand Building Parts In-House & Incorporating the BBS Unlimited Wheels
04:42 Scanning the Vehicle & 3D Printing
05:04 Finding the right car and repurposing uses for it
05:17 What is the biggest issue to solve for?
Check out what’s new and watch more Toyota SEMA videos:
▶Latest videos from Toyota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9oDov874rQ&list=PLsOvRYzJPCwVPnQZg9qWBpGP8oHLM1aT_
▶More Toyota SEMA Show videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZq_5EPEKg&list=PLsOvRYzJPCwUOCtl_IzAzuB063QdnmDPS
▶Watch the “Tacoma X-Runner Concept”: SEMA Build Episode 1 | Toyota: https://youtu.be/WtU0QWxXYik
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