Toyota’s ME.WE concept sports light body, weighty conscience

The world's largest automaker worries the world has too many cars.

That's the only conclusion to draw from the latest concept car unveiled today by Toyota in Paris. Dubbed the ME.WE, and designed in a partnership with French architect/inventor Jean-Marie Massaud, Toyota calls the car an "anti-excess vehicle," designed to tread lightly on the environment with every touch of its electric-powered wheels. Toyota says the ME.WE suggests the future of transportation, which may make the present seem like a gilded age.

As described by Massaud, the idea behind the ME.WE was to build a vehicle that met as many of its owners' demands as possible without swaddling them in two tons of steel, leather and carbon dioxide that took more from the environment that it could ever replace. "For me, the car is symbolic of an age in which there is a plethora of things, in which everything is opulence," Massaud says. "We realize we are living outside of our real needs."