TOGG car models in Israel
TOGG models
TOGG. Turkey’s first electric vehicle brand
TOGG is Turkey’s first electric vehicle brand. Founded in 2018, the Turkish automaker launched production of electric vehicles in November 2022. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dreamed of his own national brand even before being elected. The TOGG association stands for Türkiye’nin Otomobili Girişim Grubu, meaning ‘Turkish car’. It is a project of five major business representatives of the country: the car manufacturer BMC, the brewing company Anadolu Group, the cellular operator Turkcell, the industrial and energy holding company Zorlu and the Union of Chambers of Commerce and Commodity Exchanges. The CEO is Gürkan Karakash, who previously worked for Bosch, and the executive director is Sergio Rocha, who ran GM Korea.
Turkish automotive industry
We can say that the cars are Turkish oil. After all, 73% of all cars produced by local factories are sent abroad, and in return they receive income, which was equal to 29.3 billion dollars in 2022, so this is the most popular national exported product (13.3% of total external income). A total of 1.3 million passenger cars and light commercial vehicles were produced in Turkey in 2021. In Europe, Turkey ranks fourth in terms of automobile production. In addition, almost all components are produced in the country! But, what is most interesting, the Turkish automobile industry cannot completely meet its own domestic demand for cars: seven out of ten cars produced are exported (5 to Europe, the rest to other countries), and only 3 are sold in the domestic market.
Long-awaited own brand
Turkey’s traditional automotive industry consists of assembly plants for global brands, and the Turks wanted to have their own national car manufacturer, as the country has always had a shortage of cars. And this brand had to be electric according to the trends. The first samples of Turkey’s future electric vehicle were presented in 2019, when the construction of a new automobile plant began near the city of Gemlik, located in the ‘automotive’ province of Bursa, where most of the plants of the foreign companies are located. It cost about 3.7 billion dollars to build and its potential capacity is 175,000 vehicles per year. The plant is 90% automated. The company plans to produce one million TOGG electric vehicles by 2030.
Model range
The first model of the new brand TOGG is an as yet unnamed SUV designed by the Italian studio Pininfarina, the price of which ranges from 43,000 to 54,000 dollars. It is a medium-sized vehicle with a wheelbase of 2.8 m, rear or all-wheel drive, equipped with one or two engines. A simple modification with an electric motor has a capacity of 272 hp, is able to drive about 300 km without recharging and accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 7.6 seconds. The second, more advanced version produces 544 hp thanks to a pair of engines and already travels up to 500 km, accelerating in 4.8 seconds.
The Turkish manufacturer is planning four other models. The SUV will be followed by a compact sedan in 2024, after which the manufacturer will release a liftback, a small urban SUV and a compact MPV. TOGG plans to start supplying electric vehicles not only to its home market, but also to Europe in a year and a half. In the foreseeable future, expansion to EU countries, including Germany and France, will begin.
