Toyota announced a dramatic shift toward electric vehicles, unveiling a lineup of 15 new EVs that will join the oddly-named bZ4X, including a new Toyota pickup and a cool compact Land Cruiser SUV. Lexus will join many rival brands by converting 100% to EVs in America by 2030. And Lexus has offered us a complete look at what should be the first and perhaps the most important of those new EVs, the RZ. The Z stands for “zero” and will be Lexus’s EV brand.

Lexus builds some of our favorite SUVs on the market. But while the all-new LX arrives soon and a new GX may be soon to follow, the brand’s best-selling SUV, by a long way, is the RX midsize crossover. It’s reasonable to presume the Lexus most buyers will want a few years down the road will be the RX — but electric. That’s pretty much what the RZ will be.

Firm details from Lexus are few at this stage. But the RZ looks like a Lexus-ified version of the bZ4x. And it should run on the same platform as it and the Subaru Solterra. We can probably expect that the RZ will get more horsepower than either of those two vehicles, and it should get Lexus’s new Direct4 all-wheel drive system for EVs. Lexus should at least have more details for us sometime next year.

Speaking of next year, 2022 should be a landmark year for electric vehicles. It will be the year brands begin pumping out battery-powered versions of the vehicles buyers want to drive, like conventional full-size pickups and luxury compact crossovers. And judging from the tsunami of early reservations for new EVs like the F-150 Lightning, buyers should be receptive to an offering like the RZ.

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