DETROIT — After years of teasing, toying and tinkering from Toyota, meet the 2020 Supra: the first Supra in a generation, a two-seat sports car dropped into a global market now dominated by three-row crossovers and giant SUVs.
A Toyota, assembled in Austria, powered by BMW.
Why? Why would one of the most conservative automakers in the world, a global powerhouse of profitability and meticulous product execution, take what is essentially a flier on a two-seat, rear-wheel-drive sports car and introduce it in the middle of winter at the Detroit auto show?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Sometimes in business — despite the overwhelming logic against it — you just have to do what the guy whose name is on the company wants to do.
And Toyota President Akio Toyoda wanted the Supra back in the lineup after a 21-year absence.
Toyota has been hinting at the car's return ever since it partnered with BMW in 2012 on a new sports car and showed the FT-1 concept at the 2014 Detroit auto show. And finally last summer, it said the Supra would return as a race car and production vehicle.
The Supra is the first original product developed by Gazoo Racing Co., which was cleaved off from Toyota in 2017 as an internal subcompany in a reorganization to streamline operations. But it arrives as car demand in the U.S. falls to a decades-low and shows no sign of reversing as consumers snatch up light trucks in record numbers.