Toyota is bringing a small electric city car concept vehicle to the Detroit auto show, where it will appear alongside the redesigned Prius hybrid.

No one's saying much about the car beyond confirming it is purely electric and smaller than a Prius. "It's a concept we are bringing to the show basically to confirm our interest in electric vehicles," spokeswoman Jana Hartline says, according to the Detroit Free Press.

The Japanese automaker, which expects to post its first operating loss in 70 years, is accelerating the R&D of batteries and could introduce EVs as early as 2010 — at which point it also plans to roll out the first plug-in Prius hybrids as part of its campaign to move beyond oil.

Toyota isn't making a big deal out of the world premiere of its EV

concept, which will sit alongside the more pedestrian Camrys and

Corollas on the show floor, and isn't planning a press conference to announce it. That's unusual because automakers typically announce concept vehicles to great fanfare.

Still, there's little doubt Toyota is embracing the electrification of the automobile. The company's ambitious "low carbon" agenda calls for cranking out one million hybrids a year within the first half of the next decade and accelerating the development of small electric vehicles for mass production. "Our view is that oil production will peak in the near future. We need to develop power train(s) for alternative energy sources," company president Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters when he announced the agenda in October.

As for what the EV concept will look like, we'd like to see an electric version of the awesome iQ city car coming to the United States. The iQ (pictured) is a good candidate for electrification — small, light and cute as hell, which seems to be the approach everyone but Tesla is taking with EVs. There's plenty of room under the hood for an electric motor, although the back seat would probably be tossed aside to make room for the battery. That's what BMW did with the Mini-E electric runabout. Lets just hope Toyota doesn't follow BMW in charging $850 a month for its EV.

Photo by Toyota.