levin

Great to see Jeroen Willemsen (aka Kultivate) picking up his personal blog again! :)

He has been posting a few entries for the past days including one posting about Masami Hirosaka parking his RC Levin AE86 sideways:

Damn, that's tough! :D

As being an admin of AEU86 I've seen a lot of questions, facts and fun stuff about the Toyota AE86 (hachi roku). I also see a lot of questions returning even though we documented it on the FAQ already.

So I thought: why not share it in a returning item on my personal blog as well? Be prepared to encounter silly trivial facts about the hachi roku you probably never heard before! ;)

This week we'll start off with the Levin and Trueno naming. Where did it come from?

Toyota started using the Levin and Trueno designations already back in 1971 when they created the high performance TE27 models. The TE27 Corolla was called Levin (and SR5 in the US) while the TE27 Sprinter was called Trueno. This naming scheme for both cars lived on till the AE111: the Sprinter line ended with the AE111. The Corolla line still lives and still carries on the Levin badge for the more sporty models.

Classic TE27 Levin trunk emblem

There was a rumor that the Levin means lightning and Trueno means thunder in Japanese.
The Japanese part is not true: look it up in the dictionary, there are no such words listed in Japanese.

Classic TE27 Trueno trunk emblem

Then we started looking into this on AEU86 and first found that Levin meant lightning in Middle English.
Levin/lightning part confirmed! So, if Levin means lightning, does Trueno mean thunder then?

TE27 Levin grille emblem: clearly lightning!
As you can see at the end of the topic I sent an email to Toyota Japan asking where the naming came from.

Yes it does: before the Initial D hype flushed google with references to the Sprinter Trueno I already found the name Trueno matching a lot by El Capitan Trueno on images.google.com:

El Capitan Trueno deriva al rescate
Note the lightning arcs in his name! ;)

So it was not difficult to look up trueno in the Spanish dictionary.
Trueno/thunder part confirmed!

TE27 Trueno grille emblem: is this supposed to be thunder?

Funny story is when I had a dinner with a couple of friends in a restaurant and gave a few of them a ride in my old Trueno (featuring the AEU86 reproduction decals). One of the friends was a Spanish girl and she couldn't believe the car actually was called Thunder and she was having a ride in the Thunder! :D

AEU86 Reproduction stickers of the Sprinter Trueno AE86 trunk decal

In the end I never received a reply back from Toyota Japan. So the decision why they took a Spanish and Middle English word still remains unknown!

Next week another AE86 Trivia! :)

I really found this exciting news by 7Tune.com: the Subaru/Toyota 086a compact sports car is rumored to have two different bodystyles based upon the Legacy floorpan. There are two styles: a very sleek look (Celica T230 lookalike?) and a more serious boxy version.

Toyota Subaru 086a sports car bodystyles

Why is this exciting news? Well, quite simple: the Toyota AE86 already featured two bodystyles! There was the more sporty Sprinter Trueno with the popuplights and the more serious Corolla Levin and both shared the same monocoque and bodystyle after the nose. This to improve the reuse of parts between the two cars. This caused a lot Levins to feature Trueno taillights and vice versa.

Then there was the Nissan S13 platform which did the same trick as well but differentiated between the two cars by creating a sporty hatchback and a sleek coupe for touring. After a short period people started to do swaps between the two different cars, mostly because of damaged frontends, and most of these swaps involved a Silvia S13 front to be mounted on a RPS13 180SX and creating the Sil80. The opposite of this was called the OneIva but was a bit more rare because it involved a bit more work. (I know: in the US the OneIva came rolling out of the factory, but it is Japan I'm referring to...) Nowadays we also see a lot of Silvia S15 fronts mounted on S13s and S14s as well.

Nissan Stagea C34/R34 hybrid
Also the Nissan Skyline GTR (R34/R35) front gets mounted on several cars, like the Stagea. Also let's not forget the Bee*R R324 and R334 bodykits which allow you to mount a R34 on a R32 and R33. :D

So, what will these two cars sharing the same 086a monocoque bring to us? Hopefully we'll see the hybrid bodystyles soon enough! :)

Picture of the 086a bodystyles belongs to 7Tune.com and you can find it here: 086a rumors on 7Tune.com