Toyota's new retro Supra looks backwards, not forward
2020 Toyota Supra
The embargo on driving impressions of the 2020 Toyota Supra ended last night and automotive media is awash with articles and videos. I think the best one I’ve read so far is the one by Patrick George over at Jalopnik. You don’t have to read many of these to appreciate that this is a car with a lot of emotional baggage in the sense of people trying to decide if it measures up to the old (Celica) Supras or even if it should be considered a Toyota at all. The undertone to a lot of this angst: Is this just a Z4 coupe?
Frankly, none of that bothers me at all. The nature of small volume enthusiast cars is that platform and system sharing is going to be more and more of a thing to make production financially viable, so get used to it.
No, what bothers me about the Supra is that the gestalt of the thing is fundamentally retro in that it looks backwards, towards the 1990s, rather than forward. Numerous articles make clear that Toyota started from the premise that the car had to have an inline-6 engine, just like the old Supra, and thus the die was cast. A modern one wasn’t in Toyota’s inventory, and it would be too expensive to develop one, so they had to partner with BMW. Now you have a long engine and the driver’s position pushed way back. To get the handling you want means keeping the wheelbase short so the back seat gets deleted, killing a bunch of sales volume. Now you’ve got an even lower volume car where it’s hard to justify engineering and certifying more than one configuration, and that probably eliminated the possibility of a manual transmission.
Now consider a slightly different universe where Toyota had decided instead to make a different sort of Supra, one that feels like a product of the 2020s and embodies the character of modern Toyota. What might that car look like? Imagine the directive from Mr. Toyoda: Make a performance hybrid, affordable and environmentally responsible, but truly compelling to drive. With a mission like that, it’s easy to start imagining a 2020 Supra with a turbocharged four (or three!) in which the electric drive system is used in the Ferrari way, to eliminate turbo lag and provide instant response. An automatic transmission, sure, but with paddles to control regenerative braking and thermally limited extra torque from the electric drive motor for passing or powering out of corners. A new way to drive that rewards the involved, skilled operator. I would very much like to experience that Supra.
Toyota has instead just introduced what is probably the best possible 1990s Supra and for that I’m a little sad. The future doesn’t have to be depressing, it can potentially be awesome, but we have to actually work at it.
