ToyotaAfter nearly a decade of buildup, the 2020 Toyota Supra is finally here. And the question that usually comes when you talk about it is this: Why? Why the BMW 3.0-liter turbo inline-six engine and platform? Why not an all-Toyota setup to headline this famous car’s comeback story? I talked to Tetsuya Tada, the car’s chief engineer and Toyota’s performance boss, and got some illuminating answers about car packaging, noise regulations and even why the other Toyota sports car has a Subaru motor.(Full Disclosure: Toyota flew me out to Middleburg, Virginia for the Supra’s launch, and also paid for my lodging, food and booze.)And by “talked to” I mean “cornered at dinner while the poor man was just trying to eat some soup” ahead of driving the new Supra at Summit Point Motorsports Park for the car’s American launch.But it turns out Tada is a gracious fellow, and eager to talk about the birth of a car that’s very much his baby.
He likened the new Supra’s arrival to his son being born.(He’s also a bit of a character, too; turns out he’s a hardcore Pokémon Go enthusiast who spent part of his day in Washington D.C. ahead of the Supra event trying to catch some, including up near the White House.)I’ve been covering the new Supra’s development pretty much the entire time I have worked at Jalopnik, seven years now. That’s seven years of wild car magazine rumors, spy shots, concept cars, more concept cars, our own renderings based on internal documents and now, finally, the car’s debut. To say I’m eager to finally get behind the wheel is an understatement.Tada is well aware of the long gestation process, too. He’s been with Toyota for more than 20 years and was slated to work on the Mark IV Supra’s replacement back in the 1990s, a car that sadly never happened. He went on to develop compact vans and then the 86 joint venture with Subaru.
That’s given him a lot of time to know what he wanted to do with the Supra if he ever got the chance again.As such he’s been eagerly watching the reactions online to the car he’s been wanting to do since the late 1990s. He’s aware of some of the criticisms around the new Supra’s $50,920 price, BMW underpinnings and automatic-only powertrain. But he’s also convinced they’ve built a legitimate Porsche Cayman S-fighter and that fans will come away impressed.Photo: ToyotaThat’s why, he told me through an interpreter, he’s eager to clear up what he feels are some misconceptions about the new Supra.The biggest one, he said, is that it’s just “a BMW parts bin car”; he strongly objects to this characterization, even if it is one we ourselves have made based on a close look at the motor and chassis involved.But Tada said Toyota and BMW worked very closely on early stage development of the Supra and its twin the Z4, but they had similar aims. This time around, Tada told me,
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