‘Vehicle Hubs’ reimagined
Vehicle Hubs are the part of toyota.com.au where every car in the range gets its own page. They used to be where you went to learn everything you wanted to know about a car, before answer engines spoiled all the fun.
Proposed BEP (Brand Experience Page) in vehicle hubs for Toyota’ s biggest-selling vehicle, the Toyota HiLux.
The ask
Create a working prototype showcasing a design for Toyota’s biggest-selling vehicle to ensure the approach would be fit for purpose across the range, plus have something to demo to the wider group of stakeholders across multiple departments within Toyota who touch vehicle hubs, so that they could see how the changes would affect their day to day.
Choose your HiLux adventure of Out Bush, Daily Driving or Hard Yakka, and the page rebuilds itself around the life you are actually buying the car for.
What I found
While the ask arrived correctly specified, the way people make any large purchase has changed significantly.
Toyota.com.au is no longer where preference gets formed. It is where a decision already made gets confirmed, and each vehicle’s page was still built to educate rather than validate. The stakes are high too: Chinese disruptor brands went from 0.2% of Australian vehicle sales in 2015 to 20.4% in 2025, and internal modelling put a 9% annual swing in customer lifetime spend on where Toyota’s share of voice in answer engines lands. Imagery also needed a re-think. Assets were generic across the range, so a HiLux buyer and a bZ4X buyer met the same visual language and neither saw the life they were buying the car for reflected on the BEP (brand experience page). With Toyota not ready to move to a fully agentic shopping experience, we needed to appeal to buyers who had decided on a vehicle, and wanted to visualise it in their lives with imagery that reflected that when they came to the site.
What could be themed for 4WD enthusiasts...
...could also be themed for those wanting a true workhorse.
What we did
We structured the page as a story rather than a specification, the classical narrative arc laid over the purchase funnel, so every section serves an emotional moment instead of a category of information. Then we ensured it could be read twice, by humans and machines, in the decision language people actually use. Best for towing. Right for a family with children under five. Built for Australian conditions.
Art-directed AI image packs generated around each car’s own stills allowed us to create a branded story for each, allowing us to keep the details of each model authentic and on spec. On HiLux that became a switch on the page itself. Select from Out Bush, Daily Driving, Hard Yakka, and the whole page re-themes around the selection, showcasing the vehicles in a truly Australian context.
With an agentic northstar on the horizon, we set the work out as ‘now’ and ‘next’. This redesign, lifestyle-led and validation-first, then ‘Ask Toyota’ (Toyota’s proposed conversational commerce agent) after it, which would answer any buyer’s residual questions on the page in the moment one occurs. Toyota protect the brand by moving incrementally, but a market being rerouted by answer engines does not wait. So the answer had to be a step rather than a leap. Buildable now, worth doing on its own terms, and leaving the agentic version as the obvious evolution.
The same page out bush. Whatever it is showing you, the dynamic island means a price and a test drive are just one tap away.
Where it landed
Nothing had shipped when I left and what appears on these pages is a prototype. The vision and the prototype were with the full stakeholder group.
Vehicle Hubs is not a page redesign. It changes what the page is for, which reaches into how the range is marketed, how every asset gets made, and what a dealer expects a visitor to arrive knowing. Work of that shape moves at the speed of the number of people who have to be brought across it, and at Toyota that number is large.
The best thing about the proposed approach was the dynamic island that transformed according to the content it sat on top of, from theme swticher to range selector, to pricing details, to inside/outside explorer, always with the option to contact a dealer right there as a selection. It is proposed this turns into a question field for the agentic ‘Ask Toyota’ integration that will happen in the future.
Grade, power, towing capacity, colour and price in one place, ending where a decided buyer is actually headed: what’s in stock at a local dealership.
What I’d do again
Use a mix of technical photography and AI.
The image packs only work because the vehicle in every frame is legit, with the world built around it. There was an another version where the car is generated too, and it would have been undetectable to almost everyone almost all of the time. Almost is the problem. A risk-averse manufacturer whose entire positioning rests on reliability cannot be the one showing you a car with a detail subtly wrong.
Client
Toyota
Role
Executive Creative Director
responsibilities
Executive creative direction Stakeholder management Experience Strategy content design AI image pipeline Team leadership
DURATION
15 WEEKS