Senior officials, including Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda and BMW Chairman Nobert Reithofer, celebrate their expanding alliance.

What do you get when BMW and Toyota set down to develop a sports car? We’re apparently about to find out, their joint effort reportedly set to make its eagerly awaited debut at this year’s Tokyo Motor Show.

The midsize sports car is one of several projects that the German and Japanese automaker have announced as part of a growing alliance first announced in 2011. Among other things, the two makers plan to work on fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries and hybrid technology, while BMW is now providing diesel engines for Toyota to use in its European line-up.

“I get so excited thinking about the cars that will result from this relationship,” Toyota chief Akio Toyoda said in January.

So do a lot of industry observers waiting to find out precisely what the two partners have in store.

The Scion FR-S, the result of a partnership between Toyota and Subaru.

Apparently, the wait won’t be long, the results of the BMW-Toyota project expected to debut in November at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show, according to a report by Motor Trend.

Exactly what the new sports car will look like remains to be seen but it is expected to be a much more high-performance vehicle than the little sports car Toyota developed in a separate partnership with Subaru parent Fuji Heavy Industries that is sold in various parts of the world as the Toyota GT86, Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ.

Various reports and sources suggest the new sports car will likely feature a BMW inline-four powertrain, though whether it would be lifted from the likes of the current BMW Z4 line remains to be seen.  But according to Motor Trend, a hybrid is also under consideration, perhaps even one utilizing in-wheel electric motors on the front axle.

“I am hoping for a synergy effect with BMW that will result in a product that none of us could have imagined,” Tetsuya Tada, the chief engineer on the project – and the head of the FR-S/GT86/BRZ program – said on Toyota’s UK blog in March. The target is “something more than anyone expects. I would like that to be something like a sports car. I would even go so far as to say that for the collaboration to work we have to bring a product which exceeds all these expectations.”

Whatever the results, there are likely to be two very distinctly different versions of the new sports car, one for Toyota and another for BMW – unlike the virtually identical product that emerged from the Toyota/Subaru joint venture.

Joint ventures have become the increasing norm in today’s hotly competitive auto industry. BMW’s arch-rival Mercede-Benz is working on a variety of joint vehicle programs with the decade-old Renault-Nissan Alliance. Among other products likely to emerge will be a replacement for the old Smart fortwo and Renault Twingo, and several small luxury cars for Nissan’s Infiniti brand.

Until recently, Toyota took pride in doing things on its own but that has shifted substantially. Along with the BMW partnership, the Japanese giant has also announced a joint hybrid development effort with Ford, for example.

“No one can handle it all by themselves,” Yoshi Inaba, who until recently served as president and COO of Toyota Motor North America, told TheDetroitBureau.com.