Toyota Scion 01 SxS Concept: 300+ HP Hybrid Side-by-Side with Silent Mode
Toyota Brought a Truck Hybrid Drivetrain to a Side-by-Side
The Scion 01 concept landed at the 2025 SEMA Show with a powertrain straight out of the Tacoma: the 2.4-liter turbocharged hybrid four-cylinder from the i-Force Max, good for over 300 horsepower and 465 lb-ft of torque. That engine in a side-by-side is not a small thing. It’s a full-size truck unit in a machine built to thread trails.
The Scion name is a bit of a callback. Toyota retired the youth-car brand in 2016, and dusting it off for an off-road concept is a deliberate choice — though Toyota is careful to frame this as a design and engineering study, not a product announcement.
Silent Mode Is the Feature Worth Paying Attention To
Most performance SxS concepts lead with peak horsepower. The Scion 01 has that, but its more interesting card is Silent Mode: an EV-only setting that lets the machine creep down a trail at near-zero noise. Useful for hunting, camping near others, or just not blowing up the quiet on a backcountry run. Then when you need the full hybrid punch, it’s there.
Toyota’s CALTY design studio — based in the US — shaped the exterior, and the proportions are aggressive. It measures 76 inches wide, rides on 35-inch Maxxis Carnivore tires mounted on 17-inch, 5-lug wheels, and sits with 17 inches of ground clearance. The wheelbase is 133 inches, which is long for an SxS. That length favors high-speed stability over tight switchback agility, though Toyota says the concept is meant to handle both.
Suspension Setup
Up front: clamshell A-arms. Out back: a trailing arm setup braced by three radius rods. Three-inch fully adjustable shocks handle both ends. That’s a race-spec layout, not a weekend-warrior compromise. The geometry is dialed for speed runs as much as articulation, which lines up with the FIA credentials below.
The Cage and the Parts Bin
The roll cage is FIA-compliant and was built in-house by Toyota, designed to meet both SCORE and FIA racing standards. That level of certification doesn’t happen on a pure show car. Someone was thinking about real competition use.
Beyond the cage, the Scion 01 leans heavily on existing Toyota components: hubs, brakes, differentials, CV joints, drivelines, and the steering box all come from current production vehicles. Whether that’s a practical shortcut for a concept build or a preview of how a production version might source parts is an open question.
So Is Toyota Getting Into the SxS Market?
No — at least not officially. Toyota has been direct: the Scion 01 is a creative design study. There is no announced production plan, no pricing, and no roadmap for Toyota entering the powersports space in any formal way.
Still, the engineering investment here is hard to square with a purely decorative exercise. A functioning hybrid drivetrain, a certified FIA cage, production-sourced mechanical components — that’s real money and real engineering hours. Brands don’t usually go that deep on something meant only to sit under lights at a convention center. Whether it ever turns into something you can buy is genuinely unknown, but the Scion 01 is clearly more than a styling sketch.