toyota

Somewhere during early October I spotted this immaculate white MR2:

White Toyota MR2 mk1
This 1987 MR2 is a USDM import and entered the Netherlands somewhere in 1993. Somehow it surely must have been garaged a lot during its life: my Trueno was imported to the Netherlands during the same era but did not survive the Dutch weather well and the MR2 is renowned to be rust proofed just as bad as the AE86...

White Toyota MR2 mk1
I only saw this MR2 once, so I don't have many pictures of it. As you can see the MR2 is parked in front of building which is under construction. Well the building is still under construction, so maybe the owner will return when everything has been finished. ;)

Red Toyota MR2 mk1
The same day I spotted this faded red MR2 somewhere in a private yard. It is about 150 meters away from the white MR2 and doesn't have its MOT renewed since 2000... The yard used to be owned by a secondhand car dealer, so maybe this MR2 is a leftover? I'm still thinking about visiting the owner of the place and do some inquiries about the car. :)

Got a mixed bag of Toyota commercials from Japan: Starlet KP60 Trans Europe trial, Corona T100, Celica XX mk1, Chaser MX30 and the KE30 saloon!

Even though I live in Europe, in a country next to Germany I still have no idea what the Trans Europe Trial actually is... It must have been something like Toyota wanted to prove the Starlet was an excellent car for European roads, therefore it would certainly be an even better car for the Japanese roads!

The Corona T100 looks like it would have been sophisticated back in a day, but with those features (central warning light, 5mph bumpers) you can even find on BYDs nowadays!

And that Chaser MX30! Of course if you first run it flat out on the saltflats (who put those lines there??) you definitely need to wash your hair!

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

Well it's the big news of today anyway and I already put it on the AEU86 twitter, so why not place it here again:
Toyota and Subaru have announced that, due to the financial crisis, they postponed their joint development of a small FR coupe (also known as the successor of the Toyota Corolla AE86) till at least 2012 while the originial plan was they would start with building late 2011.

Reason for this can be sought in the shrinking market for cars in Japan. The market has been shrinking for years now due to reliability of cars, but it became worse because of the financial crisis.

My gut feeling is that it will probably be postponed till 2013, but of course this does not mean it will never meet the market at all. At least it should temper the expectations of the car since it was over-hyped anyway.

This is how the car probably would look like:

Artist impression of what the small FR coupe should look like

Original source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aCU1OZuheIys&refer=j...

I found the news already copied here (in order of time):
http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/blog/2008/12/22/rwd-toyobaru-on-hold-nsx...
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/22/report-toyobaru-delayed-until-2012-or...
http://speedhunters.com/archive/2008/12/23/news-gt-gt-toyota-subaru-fr-p...

This kind of amazed me: Toyota actually advertised touge drifting!!
This 1982 Starlet advertisement shows Ove Andersson drifting a Starlet down a mountain:

Only a year after this commercial they released the AE86 which became the icon for touge drifting. However nowadays Toyota keeps a lot of distance from most racing sports. Especially anything getting near road-racing, like drifting for example.