Tesla lands $60 mln contract to build electric RAV 4

Tesla landed a $60 million dollar contract with Toyota earlier this week to develop the drive-train of an all electric version of the popular Toyota RAV 4 SUV. You may remember that back in May of this year Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla Motors and announced that the two companies would work together developing both the electric RAV 4 and Lexus RX SUVs at Tesla’s newly acquired NUMMI plant in California.

The $60 million dollar deal was unveiled in a Toyota regulatory filing this month which indicated that Tesla would develop the battery systems, transmission, electric motors, software and power electronics module for the Toyota and Lexus SUVs. Tesla shares ended the trading day up 1.02% (TSLA).

Toyota is expected to show the first electric RAV 4 at the upcoming LA Autoshow however they aren’t expected to go on sale till 2012. Toyota did build it’s own electric RAV 4 all the way back in 1997 in a test program but discontinued it in 2003, the cars were very popular however and many people who leased them took the option to buy after Toyota decided to quit the program, today there are still about 750-800 of the original electric RAVs on the road in the United States.

Hopefully this time Toyota will keep the faith and maintain a solid yearly production of the zero emissions SUV.