No doubt about it, the new Toyota Supra is an incredible head turner. I’m way past the age of using cars to troll for the opposite sex, but it was difficult not to chuckle when I was going through the drive-through of our local Culver’s restaurant this week – with my wife in the passenger seat – and not one but two teenage girls who worked there squeezed through the window solely to gawk at the bright yellow Supra and tell me how amazing it was.
And that was only one of several instances where, especially if you were sensitive to responses as I was, it was obvious that Supra’s ultra-pinched sports-car styling and yellow blur attracted eyes and swiveled necks as if it were a powerful human-tissue magnet.
That’s exactly the effect Toyota was looking for when it brought back the Supra nameplate for the 2020 model year, two decades after it ceased U.S. sales of a car that began as a sporty version of the Toyota Celica econobox. Toyota did so through a joint venture with BMW, and in fact Supra shares a basic mechanical platform with BMW’s heralded Z4 convertibles. For that reason, Supra is available in an automatic transmission only, a restriction that — quite understandably — many sports-car purists choke on.
In any event, besides how it wins looks and starts conversations, the most interesting thing about Supra is that it managed to survive Covid and the industry’s shift toward all-electric vehicles and has become exactly the kind of halo model that Toyota executives envisioned when they touted Supra heavily at auto shows and then launched the nameplate’s fifth generation in 2019.
In that way, today’s Supra strikes me as a piece of time-capsule memorabilia that managed to survive the last 18 months of craziness and demonstrates that becoming excited about a striking, performance-focused, gasoline-powered vehicle is still something a lot of Americans like to do.
In terms of performance, Supra certainly looks the part, with its rakish silhouette, dual-exhaust pipes and just a little bit of throatiness in its voice in routine driving. Chalk that up to how Toyota engineers skillfully harnessed BMW’s B58 engine, a turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six that produces 335 horsepower and 365 pound-feet of torque and is paired with ZF’s eight-speed automatic.
But it’s not as if punching the Supra’s accelerator immediately delivers neck-snapping acceleration that you might expect from a form and powertrain so designed and built for excitement. Don’t get me wrong — Supra is a very fun drive -- but it more reminds me of the damp satisfaction you might have gotten from driving the Saturn Sky convertible back in the day rather than the air-whipping excitement of driving the now-defunct Chrysler Crossfire or the raw exhilaration of piloting the Audi TT coupe, whose future seems to be hanging by a thread.
In any event, the experience of driving and riding in a Supra also is compromised for many people by the extremely tight interior proportions. Not only boomers like me found it difficult to duck and swivel with sufficient dexterity to get into the driver’s seat without bumping our noggins overhead, but also a couple of Gen Z passers-by – plenty young and lithe enough to make the entrance – found the fit in Supra difficult because of their above-average height. Shoulder room also is a problem. So is lane-shifting while looking through the coupe’s tiny rear quarter-windows.
Sitting in the cockpit of Supra certainly delivered on the atmospherics of driving a sports car, with low-to-the-road positioning, a tight ceiling, and a long interior that gives you some idea of what it might be like to be waiting to be shot out of a cannon. The all-around black interior of the Supra I drove only added to that sensation. So did the lack of a sunroof (an understandable concession to the imperatives of exterior design for this particular vehicle). My chagrin at the vibe bordered on feelings of claustrophobia.
But when people set down their hotdogs and rush to the window to see what you’re driving, Supra makes up for most of that.
Toyota Supra Turns Heads, Then Turns More — Especially In Yellow - Forbes
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