- Salted caramel almost anything
- Espousing uninformed, misguided, authoritative sounding dribble
- Cappuccinos – not salted caramel though
The Toyota Supra
I mean, I know a little about it: I can spot one in a crowd, and I can read about it on Wikipedia. But I don’t know most things – like development costs, profit margins, or target market demographics. The exact things needed to make the following statements even remotely plausible.
-
Everybody and their mother killed the Supra in a great big team effort
- There are non-car people working at Toyota and they should quit
- Nissan is doing one hell of a job keeping the dead
Supra dead
In 1997 everybody had lots of money and they were all ready and willing to spend. It was the middle of the longest continuous economic expansion in US history, oil was back to cheap after the gulf war, and the Yen was
Americans could finally afford a little something extra in
the automobile department, and we figured the bigger your SUV, the thicker your
pen is to write checks. Anyhow, that was the beginning of the large SUV and the
end of the berserker Japanese sports car. For a while.
Ten years later, in 2007, the number of sports car models Toyota sold was exactly zero. For the first time since 1969, Toyota offered no sports or sporty cars. The last of the breed, the Celica, was axed only the year before. And no, the Scion TC doesn’t count. From a styling and performance perspective, it never quite fit the bill.
Toyota Models
But the story isn’t over there. Or at least I hope it isn’t. We still have an appetite for the sports car, so why won’t Toyota satisfy us?
Well, they’re starting to. Kind of. The GT-86 is a serious
step in the right direction, but it wasn’t all Toyota, was it? The cost-sharing
program with Subaru demonstrates that someone at Toyota still isn’t willing to
take on that risk alone – someone at Toyota believes the spreadsheet should
dictate which cars to R&D, and which cars should take up space on dealer
lots. Someone at Toyota still doesn’t believe in the sports car, and they need
to go.
But at the end of the day, the GT-86 was green lighted, so Toyota is willing to at least test the waters once again. Good on them. However, something else happened in 2007 that, I suspect, is now the
only reason for keeping our filthy little hands away from the new Supra.
Nissan’s GT-R
It’s long known that Nissan and Toyota ignored their own gentleman’s agreement to limit horsepower in the Skyline and Supra, meaning at one point Toyota cared enough about their own car, as well as the other guy’s, to lie to various governments and to the population at large. And god bless them for it. Seriously.
It’s probably a safe bet then that, when it comes to resurrecting
the Supra name, Toyota won’t do it until they have something that’s
competitive, once again, with the old rivals. And good lord have you seen what
that GT-R can do? You have to step into something truly exotic to fell Godzilla,
and whatever that thing is always makes the Nissan look as tall as a minivan.
The Supra will almost inevitably be a loss leader, which to
bean counters is impossible to imagine, so let me explain how this will work
through the magic of metaphor.
The Supra is a man. A big man, with big arms and a big chest
and a big beard. And he’s angry and he throws a chair through a window.
Now, you would think that a big man with a temper should be
terrifying, right? That people would run away in fear? Well, if the man is
handsome enough, and the Supra absolutely was, an odd thing happens: That big,
scary, hairy man has lots of sex with lots of women. Additionally, there will
be many more women who want to have sex with the scary man, but are already married.
So they go home and have fantasy sex with their noodly armed husbands.
In this case, we the car-enthusiast buying public are the horny women,
and the noodly armed husbands we want to have sex with are other Toyota models that we end up buying, and it’s at this point that
the metaphor breaks down. But you get the point.
Just do it, Toyota!
