Toyota has officially revealed plans for its upcoming sports car co-development program with Fuji Heavy Industries, who owns the Subaru brand. The compact rear wheel drive car will feature a Subaru boxer engine, and both Toyota and Subaru will market the car separately under its respective badges. It will be built on a new Subaru platform, but will be designed by Toyota.
“I think there is high potential for this car. We haven’t had a sports car for a long time. This is a long-awaited-for model. Pricing would be not prohibitively high,” said Toyota Motor Corp CEO Katsuaki Watanabe. The car should be quite fun indeed, with rear wheel drive dynamics and that rumbly boxer engine note.
Since FHI president Ikuo Mori says he has personally driven a test version of the car and is pleased with it, development must have been going on for quite some time now. The car will be launched in 2011.
Other Toyota-FHI joint ventures will also increase, and FHI will stop producing compact vehicles of its own design. It will use Daihatsu badge engineered vehicles instead. The Subaru Justy based on the Daihatsu Boon was the first such Daihatsu-based compact vehicle, with the next one set to be a Subaru-badged Daihatsu Coo in October 2008.
Also confirmed is Toyota’s increase in Subaru stakeholding from the current 8.7% up to 16.5% in a deal valued at 31.1 billion yen (US$311 million).
After dabbling for years in the IT industry, Paul Tan initially began this site as a general blog covering various topics of personal interest. With an increasing number of readers paying rapt attention to the motoring stories, one thing led to another and the rest, as they say, is history. An avid electronic gadget aficionado as well as big-time coffee lover, he's also the executive producer of the Driven motoring TV programme.
2011…. still must wait for so long…..
guess i’m out working to buy one that time.
Toyota seems to be growing and growing….world domination, Mr. Watanabe? ….”insert evil laugh here”…
is this regarding the revival of AE86??
good luck Toyota… but GTR still the best…
good luck trying to afford a gtr
nissan should make a succesor the s15. but just a little cheaper
sounds familiar lah…
looks like they are talking about sharing AE86 revival model with this one…
eh..strange lah new generation tauhu car with boxer engine…
When will Perodua badged of this car will be in our shore?
I like how that sounds already. Will be waiting.
sound interesting…best of luck to toyota…then..u transform that car to japan gt..then race with gtr n nsx…
dis week gt japan gt…hopefully nsx will bounce back after gtr dominated the first race…forza nsx..forza raybrig nsx…
ok, i guess i got enough time to save money till 2011.
3 years, time to load up the bank
Anyway GTR luxury sport car not enthusia type(unless they done a lot of modification for the race),so dun hope too much on it,Nomura Ken tested it also mention that it’s not suitable for racing.
Check out on Video Option Vol.166 Special,there’s a test drive by Skyline expert.