Toyota takes a leaf out of Mitsubishi’s book by combining a road car with an SUV to come up with its latest urban-oriented concept car, the ViRA – a mash-up of the Yaris and RAV4.

TOYOTA WILL PRESENT its latest concept, the ViRA at the Tokyo Auto Salon next week. And while details are almost non-existent, the Japanese car maker has said the concept is a mash-up, more or less, of the Yaris small car and the RAV4 SUV. So why’s it called ViRA?

Simple. In a lot of markets the Yaris is known as the Vitz, hence the Vi part of the name, and the RA you can probably already guess. To be honest it’s almost impossible, even if you squint, to pick out either the RAV4 or Yaris in the styling of the thing.

To my eyes the ViRA concept looks to have been influenced more by the old-school Honda CR-X than either of the two Toyota models… We don’t know what’s under the bonnet, but it’s possible it could be a hybrid drivetrain, or even full electric with electric motors at the front and back to create an all-wheel drive platform, but this is all speculation.

If Toyota does indeed follow Mitsubishi’s chatter about its crossover/SUV future at the Tokyo Motor Show, then we could see a lot more companies moving away from a city car and a country car, and smashing them together to come up with a hybrid of both, if you know what we mean.

We’ll have more information about the ViRA concept when Toyota reveals it in full at the Tokyo Auto Salon next week.