The 2020 Toyota Supra rear-wheel-drive sports coupe is revealed at the 2019 North American International Auto Show, January 14, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan. Bill Pugliano | Getty Images We've been hearing the word, "passion," a lot from Akio Toyoda since he was named president, in 2009, of the company his grandfather founded. Over that past decade, we've seen Toyota adopt an increasingly aggressive design language, but it's taken until now for it to show that it really understands what that word means, especially to serious performance fans. It certainly has chosen the right vehicle, the 2020 Toyota Supra making its return to showrooms after a painful, 21-year absence. The Supra was, for past generations, the "halo car" for a brand that had built a reputation for otherwise producing reliable, if blandly plain-vanilla products. Toyota hopes to accomplish the same goal this time around, though it has taken an unusual path to get there. In a global market increasingly fixated on SUVs and crossover vehicles, sports car sales have been withering. From the day he was named president, Toyoda, who uses the correct Western spelling of the family name, struggled to find a way to make a viable business case for bringing Supra back into the Toyota line-up. He finally found the right formula by partnering with BMW, the German automaker facing a similar challenge justifying a new version of its two-seat Z4. The 2020 Toyota Supra Paul A. Eisenstein | TheDetroitBureau.com The project was, at times, quiet vexing. To start with, BMW wanted to build an open-top roadster, Toyota a hardtop sports car. Even after agreeing to develop an all-new platform to accommodate both targets, it was critical to ensure that the reborn Supra and the next-generation Z4 would maintain the distinctive DNA of their respective brands. It was a goal that Toyota missed with a previous collaboration. Its more plebeian sports car, the 86, was developed in cooperation with Subaru and is all but impossible to distinguish from the smaller marque's version, the BRZ. So, as we headed down to West Virginia to get our first drive of the 2020 Toyota Supra, we had to tame our skepticism. The good While they may share the same, basic platform, it turns out the two new cars have little else in common. Early on in an unusually long, seven-year development process, the Toyota and BMW development teams parted ways, barely even talking to one another since then. Tetsuya Toda, the head of the Japanese project, told us this past week that he has spent only minutes behind the wheel of the Z4. But what was accomplished early on was critical, the two teams agreeing on what automotive engineers consider the perfect proportions for a sports car platform. In terms of the new Supra that means a surprisingly short wheelbase but a wide stance, both enhancing its ability to sweep through tight corners on public roads and dance around a track — like the one at the Summit Motorsports Park in Summit Point, West Virginia, where we spent a full day flogging the two-seater around a tight and technical course demanding the best from car and driver alike. As you might expect, there's been a fair amount of controversy since BMW unveiled the new Z4 last year, Toyota following with a reveal of the Supra at the North American International Auto Show last January. The 2020 Toyota Supra Paul A. Eisenstein | TheDetroitBureau.com For one thing, those who have waited two decades for the return of the Japanese sports car have been wondering why Supra relies on a modified version of BMW's 3.0-liter inline-six, rather than using an engine pulled of Toyota shelf. And, they follow up, why does the engine make just 335 horsepower and 365 pound-feet of torque in Supra, when the Z4 punches out 382 horsepower and 369 pound-feet? Chief Engineer Tetsuya Tada answers both questions with one word: "balance." Indeed, from a performance and handling perspective, everything about the 2020 Toyota Supra emphasizes balance, starting with the perfect 50:50 weight distribution. The Summit track leaves little room for error, sending you caroming from one corner to another. Yet the Supra never seemed to lose its composure. Even if you hit the brakes late, or misread the entry to a corner, it proved uncannily tolerant and forgiving. Drive well and its precise steering and taut suspension helped you emerge from turning laps feeling like a hero. The 2020 Toyota Supra Chief Engineer Tetsuya Tada Paul A. Eisenstein | TheDetroitBureau.com The bad All that said, the 2020 Supra isn't perfect. On the plus side, the coupe bears only the slightest visual resemblance to the Z4, other than their basic dimensions. But, like so many recent Toyota products, it boasts a swirling mass of curves and angles that has proved quite controversial. Fans call the look "sculptural." Critics have called it a hodgepodge. With the new Supra, it seems, beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder. If there is one place where you might confuse the two new sports cars it's when you slide behind the wheel. The navigation screen and infotainment system of the new Supra, along with the iDrive controller, are lifted straight out of the BMW parts bin. The instrument cluster is unique to Toyota, however, and features a more classic design, centering around the tachometer. That might seem questionable considering there is, to the horror of some fans, no manual gearbox available. But the eight-speed automatic is so quick and intuitive you might overlook that lapse, especially when you get comfortable with the steering wheel-mounted paddle shifters. And, when it comes to comfort, Supra's 14-way power sports seats more than do what they're supposed to. Tighten up the bolsters and they'll hold you firmly in place on track. Spread the back wings and relax on an extended road trip, especially when you tap the selectable driver's mode switch to go from Sport to Comfort. That softens the active damping suspension and adds extra steering boost, among other things. The 2020 Toyota Supra Paul A. Eisenstein | TheDetroitBureau.com Final thoughts Coming 40 years after the debut of the original Supra, the new sports car is pretty much everything its fans were hoping for. Journalists who came away from the event were all but uniformly impressed. It's all the more impressive when you consider the $49,990 base price, before the $930 delivery fee, is actually less than what you'd have paid for the previous-generation Supra more than two decades ago. There will be three versions available, including the "base" Supra 3.0, the 3.0 Premium, at $54,920 and a limited-run Launch Edition, at $56,180. All three share the same powertrain and adaptive suspension system. The Premium adds niceties like an 8.8-inch touchscreen, a head-up display and 12-speaker JBL sound system. And the Launch Edition, limited to 1,500 cars, kicks in red mirror caps, black wheels, a red leather interior and a special, commemorative plaque. We expect Toyota will sell out the Launch Edition but even company officials are hesitant to predict how the 2020 Supra will fare overall in today's marketplace. As good as this new entry may be, and it completely squashed our skepticism, the sports car market is a shadow of its former glory. But there are still some buyers who want something unique and exciting, something that delivers the sort of passion you can't find in an SUV or CUV. For them, the 2020 Toyota Supra would be well worth checking out. 2020 Toyota Supra Source: Toyota<doc-sep>There was a time in my life, starting in the late 1990s and lasting several years after that, where I’d pore over every car magazine I could get my hands on looking for one specific thing. Sure, I devoured the latest news and reviews. But more than anything, I wanted to know what was going on with the new Toyota Supra. Advertisement I grew up in a family that had lots of Toyotas. My first car was a Corolla. I loved The Fast and the Furious when it came out. But even though I was barely into my driver’s license at the time, or that I could hardly afford such a car, it stung hard that Toyota’s halo car was no more. I wanted badly for a new Supra to just exist, for it to be real. It was just something I wanted out there in the world. Fast-forward 20 years. The new Supra is a thing, at long last. But if you had told me when I was a teenager that its comeback would mean a car more like a BMW M3—or more precisely, a BMW Z sports car—than any other Toyota, I’d have found that unthinkable. Crazy, even. Yet the world is a different place now. And market forces necessitated the Supra become a different car as well. The good news is that while this Supra is radically distinct in form and mission from any one that came before, it happens to be excellent—powerful, capable in the corners, fast, full of the good noises, pretty nice inside too, and fun to drive above all else. Advertisement I just wish it had a manual transmission. (Full Disclosure: Toyota flew me out to Virginia, paid for my hotel, booze and food, and supplied me with track time with the car.) “This is not a car we needed to make,” Jack Hollis told a group of reporters eager to test it before heading out to West Virginia’s Summit Point Motorsports Park. “This is a car we wanted to make.” Hollis has been waiting a long time for this day, just like I have. Today he’s group vice president and general manager of the Toyota brand in North America, and he’s been with the company 27 years. Advertisement For the last 20 of those years he’s been besieged by one question from neighbors, friends, employees and relatives: “When’s the Supra coming back?” The car is an icon now, albeit one with a stranger evolution than most will admit. It was born in the late 1970s as a larger, six-cylinder version of the everyperson Celica sports coupe. Then it grew into a hefty, plush highway cruiser, and ultimately fell into a pit of Japanese Bubble Era excess—big wing, big turbo power, big price tag. The Supra “did okay” in the 1990s, Hollis said. That is a polite way of saying it declined in sales every year and ballooned in price as it struggled to meet emissions standards before being put out to pasture in North America in 1998. Akio Toyoda’s personal Supra Advertisement But even Hollis admitted the Supra’s legend was really born three years later, when the first Fast and Furious movie showcased a neon orange thunderbolt publicly shaming a Ferrari thanks to overnight parts from Japan for its 2JZ-GTE engine. In recent years the fourth-generation Supra has become more coveted by collectors than tuners, and clean low-mileage ones regularly command six figures at car auctions. Though the reality was no match for the legend, the legend is what the new Supra—technically named the GR Supra, for “Gazoo Racing”—competes against today. Having said that, “current industry dynamics favor high-volume cars,” Hollis said. That means that even when you’re Toyota and you sell more RAV4s than Porsche sells cars, period—and even when this is a car you want to make—it’d be madness to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a niche sports car program at a time when that market is tanking. Plus, you need to spend money on autonomous vehicles and electrification instead. So Toyota went a different route. Tetsuya Tada has been waiting for this day maybe longer than anyone. As an engineer, he was supposed to work on the fifth-generation Supra in the late 1990s, before that program was scuttled when said Bubble burst and Japan’s economy and car industry summarily went with it. Advertisement Then in 2012, he abruptly left the European media launch drive of his other sports car baby, the Toyota 86, and hopped on a plane in secret to Munich. Since it was decreed from on high that a new Supra needed an inline-six like it always had, his mandate was to see if BMW—chief purveyors of that engine in modern times—wanted to team up. (Read a lot more about this car’s development saga in my interview with Tada here.) They did, Tada said. And after much discussion, it turned out BMW’s engineers had a great desire for their new Z4 to be more, to be a purer and better sports car than it’d ever been. Something that could give the acclaimed Porsche Boxster and Cayman what they felt was a needed black eye. It was from that starting point that these two companies began their work. But Tada is very adamant that he and his engineers didn’t just put a “shell” over a BMW. The cars have the same platform and same engine, but different bodies, different tuning of the engine, suspension and gearbox, and very little communication took place between the teams besides joint testing and the occasional “How’s things?” Specs That Matter The end result is a Supra that’s no longer a luxobarge or just a straight-line champion. Unlike every past Supra it’s a two-seater this time, not a 2+2. If it had a back seat, it would not have had the handling characteristics they wanted, Toyota’s people told me. Advertisement The Supra is powered by a Toyota-tuned version of BMW’s B58B30M1 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline-six, same as you’ll find in the new X5 and soon other cars. It’s an alloy block this time, not an iron block like the 2JZ was, leading to some tuner fears that gains won’t come as reliably as they once did. We will see how that goes. The Supra is rated at 335 horsepower and 365 lb-ft of torque starting at an ultra-low 1,600 RPM. It weighs a not-bad 3,397 pounds, boasts an ideal 50/50 front/back weight distribution and rockets to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds, making this the quickest (stock) Toyota-branded car ever. Power goes to the rear-wheels alone; all-wheel drive is not an option here. Benchmarked against the Cayman, it is said to have a different character than its Z4 sibling. At the same time, the sole transmission option is a paddle-shift ZF8 automatic gearbox—the best conventional torque converter-based automatic ever made. As it is in every application, it’s good here. But in many circumstances it just can’t replace the fun of a stick-shift. Advertisement Inside And Out The FT-1. Photo : Toyota At this event Hollis finally admitted, yes and officially, that the stunning FT-1 Concept born two years after BMW and Toyota struck their secret deal was in fact an attempt to explore the possibility of the Supra coming back. The positive reaction to the concept made them do it, he said. Photo : Patrick George The final product isn’t 100 percent dead-on accurate—the FT-1 was long, wide and imposing, an absolute unit of a car, like something Batman would drive. But the designers nailed a lot of the important stuff. The headlights, the overall shape, the double Gurney Bubble roof, the wide hips and the conical nose all carried over fairly well. It’s also smaller in person than it would seem in photos. Advertisement The looks have been polarizing, and while I won’t call the new Supra classically beautiful, I do like how it turned out. It has the ideal sports car proportions—long hood, compressed cabin, short rear deck. And that rear spoiler is in fact a salute to the last Supra’s famous deck hoop, though it’s comparatively more subtle now. In other aspects it’s a bit... much. All of the vents are for aesthetics only, not functionality. And that low roofline and thick A- and B-pillars make for not-great visibility from the cabin. It’s not Camaro-bad, very few cars are, but it does feel like window real estate space wasn’t a priority here. You’ll depend heavily on the camera in reverse. Advertisement You can skip ad after 1 second You can go to the next slide after 1 second Continue 1 / 6 On the plus side, it’s actually very nice inside. It feels premium like a $50,000+ car should, full of soft leather, actual carbon fiber inserts on the center console and high-quality materials all around. Being that this is a BMW underneath you also get the generally excellent modern iDrive instead of, say, the infuriating track-mouse thing that Lexus uses. And it is standard iDrive—nothing special for the Supra here. Advertisement The digital gauge cluster works great too, though the car has just an 8.8-inch touchscreen instead of one of the larger BMW units, to save space. (There’s a Toyota-first wireless Apple CarPlay, too, but Toyota’s undecided as to whether you’ll need to keep paying for it the way BMW requires.) It’s nice to be inside the Supra. While visibility isn’t superb, it is a comfortable place to be, with perfectly bolstered seats and good functionality. Toyota, or BMW or whoever, has succeeded in making a convincing luxury sports car with many grand tourer touches. I’d be happy to road-trip in this thing, something you can’t say for all sports cars. I do wonder why so much dash space was wasted with a row of numbered radio preset buttons. When was the last time you used those? I don’t think I have at all, this decade. Volume buttons are one thing, but the row feels overkill. (Update: OK, as several of you readers have pointed out, you can use those buttons to pre-program various functions besides just the radio. I’ve always been perfectly happy using iDrive, myself, but if you find this useful have at it.) A Different Character I’ll note up front that I have yet to drive the new BMW Z4. But I feel like I have a solid frame of reference here. I’ve driven basically every performance BMW made over the past six or seven years; humble lease-special 2 Series coupes, the M3 Competition, the M4, the M5, the Alpina B7, the i8 and beyond. Just two weeks before this event, I was in the new M2 Competition. Advertisement That’s why I was genuinely surprised to find out that despite sharing hardware, Toyota’s specific tuning to key areas did make the car feel like its own animal compared to those other BMWs—like it has a unique character all its own. For one, the ride is much smoother and more compliant than most performance BMWs have been lately, which addresses my chief complaint about those cars. The Supra is a much more comfortable car to drive over bad roads than any M car without giving an inch in handling prowess. Then there’s Sport Mode, a giant button (much appreciated here) which transforms the Supra’s behavior more radically than just about any other modern non-supercar I’ve driven. It’s not a subtle thing: this mode changes the engine, gearbox, steering mapping, firms up the active dampening and greatly amplifies the exhaust sound. Advertisement The button puts it in Galaxy Hoon mode, where it’s a snapping, snarling, popping-and-growling monster—far louder than even the M2. In normal driving the Supra is fast and fun, like a smaller, lighter, louder, more nimble M240i. But in Sport Mode it’s a near-beer M car, only louder still, and with a better ride than any M car I’ve tested in recent memory. Additionally, electronic stability control can be dialed down or turned off entirely. The typical German restraint feels gone here. The example that comes to mind—and I work in media, so forgive me for going here—is that the Supra’s like a beloved magazine getting a new editor.<doc-sep>
The cash return on nostalgia can't be overestimated. Movies and television helped facilitate the concept of recycled ideas (and we see how well that's worked out), but a similar trend grips the modern auto industry. Automakers have attempted to capitalize on nostalgic sentimentality for years, and the 2020 Toyota Supra is the latest attempt. But the Supra differs from other nameplates in that it isn't simply nostalgia for nostalgia's sake (looking at you, Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross). This is a genuinely transcendent product, pushing the limits of what's possible in a competitive class, albeit with a platform, engine, and interior borrowed from BMW. For fanboys, the idea of a Bavarian-built Supra (or, Austrian-built, technically) may be a tough sell. But get behind the wheel and the end result is a product that far exceeds any preconceived notions. Haters be damned. Visually, the new Supra is no throwback. Sure, designers say the ducktail spoiler and double-bubble roof are nods to cars like the iconic fourth-gen Supra and 2000GT, but both claims feel like a stretch. The new Supra looks like a fully modern sports car, with nostalgia tossed mostly to the wayside when it comes to aesthetics. Senior Editor Perez Talks About His Supra Experience: Toyota Supra, Hot Or Hype? Motor1.com U.S. Podcast E007 The FT-1 Concept, which the company debuted in 2014, inspired the Supra’s angular nose and triple-vent grille openings, giving it a distinct head-on look. The side profile stands out as its best angle, revealing details of the many nooks and crannies it borrows (again) from the FT-1. In the rear, dual LED taillights, a central brake light, and dual exhaust tips on either side accentuate the Supra's wide stance. And it is wide, stretching out to 73 inches. For comparison, the Supra’s 86 sibling is 69.9 inches wide, and the Porsche 718 Cayman is 71.5 inches. Gallery: 2020 Toyota Supra: First Drive 75 Photos What you fail to see in most photos, though, is that the inlet vents (on the upper mesh on either side of the nose) are fake. The cooling ducts (just underneath the headlights) are fake too. Many of the visual cues aren't even functional. Instead, they merely attempt to give the body a more aggressive look. It feels superficial for a car that's otherwise extremely good looking. Another glaring concern arises as soon as we open the door. The Supra shares nearly all of its key components with the BMW Z4 on which it's based. The iDrive controller, optional 8.8-inch touchscreen (a 6.5-inch screen is standard), and digital instrument cluster all carry over from the Bavarian brand. But disconnect the two, and this interior is hard to hate. In typical BMW fashion, the Supra's technology is functional and easy to use. The iDrive display looks clean atop the dash, has crisp graphics, and features smartphone-esque touch responsiveness. On the highway is where we appreciate this cabin the most; the upscale interior and impressive sound deadening make the Supra an extremely comfortable place to sit. BMW parts aside, the Supra's cabin is a tech-focused, comfortable space that exceeds this car’s sub-$50,000 price tag. The Supra stands out from its BMW brethren with elements like 14-way adjustable bucket seats that securely bolster while comfortably cradle, an optional 12-speaker JBL audio system that sounds fantastic, and some high-quality leather and carbon fiber materials on the dash and center console. Built around BMW's ubiquitous turbocharged 3.0-liter engine, the Supra's inline-six lineage lives on. What we already love about BMW's inline-six in other applications – immediate power, lots of low-end torque, and eagerness at speed – carries over to the Supra where it puts down 335 horsepower and 365 pound-feet of torque. The Z4 with the same engine produces 382 hp and 369 lb-ft, although it's slower, taking 4.4 seconds to hit 60. Between first and third gear, this is car stupid quick. There's a huge burst of power the moment you hit the gas, and all 365 pound-feet of twist arrive at just 1,600 RPM. The ZF eight-speed automatic clicks through the gears, decisively enough, as the Supra sprints to 60 miles per hour in a manufacturer-estimated 4.1 seconds. Based on our butt test, it feels a touch quicker. The Supra feels a touch quicker than its 4.1-second, manufacturer-estimated sprint to 60 indicates. The Supra's perfect 50/50 distribution, 3,397-pound curb weight, and BMW-sourced engine are all anyone really talks about. But don't disregard this car’s double-joint McPherson strut front and multi-link rear suspension, nor its limited-slip rear differential.