Toyota is branching out into a new market by not only targeting adult drivers, but now children too.
Toyota introduced an electric car kit on Thursday which aimed at children of 10 years and older at a car show. The kit is a build-it-yourself kit which creates a Camatte 57swhich is a small, lightweight, four-seater, open-top electric car. The word 'Camatte' in Japanese means "Get me involved" or "Care for me".
The car does include some safety features with handbrakes placed at the rear passenger seats for the parents to activate just in case something goes awry.
"We have to figure out how to involve children with cars and make them fans of automobiles in this mature market by making interaction with the car fun. Cars are all about fun and we want to put this out to them as a suggestion and see where this goes," said 40-year-old Tsuji Kenji, the developer-in-charge of the project, according to WTVY news.
"We exhibited at the toy show because we wanted parents and kids to interact with the car," he said, "with mom and dad in the back, the kid in the front. We wanted them to enjoy it as a family."
The lineup includes a sporty coupe convertible, and a "cute" model, with cartoony, eye-like headlamps. Molded steel and fiber-reinforced plastic have been replaced with 57 body panels, attached with pins, that the maker says even very young children and the technically challenged can remove within an hour.
The overall car sales industry has been on a downward trend in Japan and domestic passenger car sales are forecast to drop by about 13 percent in 2013, Japan Automobile Manufacturer's Association said.
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