Our buddies at Autoblog have strapped on their brave pants, speculating that Toyota's LF-A supercar is DO-A. And there's plenty of evidence to back up their suspicion. There's no production date (not even 2010!), and a $225k price point that won't even pay off development costs. After an uncharacteristically unreliable 24 Hours of Nurburgring race, ToMoCo has opted for a soon-to-be-canceled SC430 silhouette on to its Super GT racer. Plus, Nurburgring testing crews and rival test drivers tell Autoblog that the LF-A is doomed to eternal test-bed status. All of which confirms that Toyota is no longer capable of producing quality performance cars. And reflects Lexus's shift in focus from performance to hybrid luxury. Meanwhile, Car Magazine reports that Honda's hybrid Open Study Model (OSM) will replace the elderly S2000 as Honda's mainline roadster. And they're not talking just styling cues either: the next S2000 will be a hybrid. Unfortunately, details are being held for Car's forthcoming print issue, so we still don't yet know exactly what flavor the hybrid will come in. If Honda's too-good-for-this-life Accord Hybrid is anything to go on, it could be something special.
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Such a pity. The sportiest thing in Toyotas lineup is a truck.
Shameful waste there.
The H2000 replacement sounds excellent, for exactly the reasons you say.
An S2000 hybrid? I’m not sure that genre of cars is begging for a hybrid powertrain. I have less of a problem with the Tesla. At least it has all of it’s chromosomes aren’t diluted. Keep the hybrid powertrains to the commuter-type cars that benefit from them and don’t genetically alter roadsters and sports cars.
I took one look at that pic before even reading anything and thought “Supra!”.
I think we are at the beginnings of a huge change in the automotive industry.
Battery costs will come down and range will be a non issue. The EV makes so much sense, a fuel burning vehicle just seems so crude in comparison.
Look at the typical vehicle right now and all of it’s systems and subsystems.
The fuel system, the exhaust, and all the parts it takes to put together the engine. Look at the parts complexity of that hellacious V6 over on autobloggreen.
With the electric, all that goes away. They potentially buy a battery pack from someone. They buy motors from someone else, and the inverter from another. The inverter also has the charger built into it.
They went from hundreds of parts to just a few.
Mitsubishi will be the first, followed by Nissan and Subaru. Toyota and Honda missed the boat on this one.
It’s infinitely much cheaper to buy electricity then to buy fuel. I’m looking for the least expensive way to get to work and back.
If I can get an EV for $16,000, it will pay for itself in three years time based on my current fuel usage. Oil changes and all that other primitive and unsophisticated nonsense is even more money saved.
I’d agree that the LF-A is a dead car walking.
It’s been in development longer than the Camaro (if that’s even possible), and still no launch date in sight.
It’s design is nothing special. And at $225K, you better have your Big Boy Pants on to run with Ferrari. I just don’t see this as an aspirational car like an F430. God’s Own Supra, maybe, but not a Lexus. As Mercedes found out with the SLR McLaren, even rich people have taste.
I’ll also add that Lexus is NOT a sports car maker, even with the IS-F. It appears that Toyota is moving their corporate image to the all-hybrid-all-the-time company. The LF-A doesn’t fit.
Meet the LF-A, the “Chinese Democracy” of cars.
All of which confirms that Toyota is no longer capable of producing quality performance cars.
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
I could think of several other valid reason to kill this project no matter how good the results have been thus far.
Not for nothing but the details have always been rather blurry regarding this car. Nothing was ever “set” regarding engine, drietrain, or even styling. With that said it could just as easily have been the case that Toyota NEVER had plans to produce this car and simply used this project to develope some technology that will go into other future products.
It could even be that Toyota reacceessed the current marketplace and can see that it is the wrong car for the current time. Wow, to think that a company can actually pull the plug on a project that will NOT make any profit under any circumstances.
Hell for that matter maybe Toyota has been smart enough to watch GM, Ford, and Chysler all lose focus over the last decade and waste precious R&D funds on worthless projects like the Viper, Ford GT, and ZR1 that will do NOTHING to improve the core businesses of these companies. Oh yeah , Nissan too with the GT-R! All of these are great cars but for the costumers and shareholders they just aint as good a Hybrid Prius.
There is a big difference between a company that will sweat the details of a $150,000+ car that will reach the hands of maybe 200 owners a year and a company that is willing to sweat the details on a $25,000 car that reach the hands of will over 300,000 owners each year.
FORGET YOU MISSION AND YOU WILL FAIL!
i liked the line, “Toyota are good at making money, but they’re no good at making sports cars.” having been the -er- proud owner of a mr2, i have to agree …
I posted this to Autoblog; I’ll rehash it here in simple form:
* The Corvette carries GM’s reputation
* The AMG Division is ne plus ultra of Mercedes
* The essence of Ford is Mustang
* The Skyline is Nissan’s most well-known car.
Now, think about Toyota. What cars are “brand defining”? What cars “carry” their reputation? Answer: the Corolla, Camry and recently, the Prius.
It’s different for Toyota than it is for, say, GM. For years, the Corvette has been the battle standard, the car that, no matter how terrible the rest of the lineup was, that GM could fall back to as proof that, yes, they were a world-class make.
Toyota didn’t need the Supra or MR2 to do that. They don’t really need Lexus, and they certainly don’t need the LF-A. They don’t even need an F1 or NASCAR presence (they have one, but four hundred thousand Camry buyers don’t care). About the only other make that works this way is Hyundai, and that’s because, like Toyota, they don’t trade on heritage or image, but on cold, hard competency.
I think the problem here is the GT-R. Isn’t it probably so that Toyota found out their LF-A was only marginally better or perhaps only on par with the GT-R to almost three times the price?
Wow, the rumor is that they were going to ask $225K?
Well, a high performance Lexus would evoke the legend of the late Mr. Lexus taking on the world with his brilliant race cars, funded by the sale of beautiful, powerful grand touring coupes to celebrities and industry titans.
Wait a second, Lexus isn’t the legendary name of a brilliant, daring, deceased race car engineer and industrialist – it is a made up name that focus groups gave birth to in 1989 (almost stillborn because of a trademark suit from Lexis-Nexis).
That doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with Lexus (I would take an IS 250 6-speed as a daily driver easily), but it does mean that several Japanese drug laws were violated by Toyota executives if they ever thought they could get north of $125K for a Lexus.
If the rumors of this car’s death are true then the Toyota executives must have come back down to reality; hopefully no so far back to reality that they kill the Toyobaru coupe. That I might buy.
All of which confirms that Toyota is no longer capable of producing quality performance cars.
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
Toyota’s departure from the sports-car market started by killing off the Supra and concluded with the death of the MR spyder.
It could even be that Toyota reacceessed the current marketplace and can see that it is the wrong car for the current time. Wow, to think that a company can actually pull the plug on a project that will NOT make any profit under any circumstances.
This goes beyond aborting the LF-A. Toyota hasn’t made a credible sports car in at least a decade. Economy be damn’d, even Nissan managed to keep the spirit of the Z alive even when they were in dire straights. I think it’s rather safe to assume that Toyota has enough cash that they can risk burning it on such a financially fruitless effort as the LF-A. That they don’t tells the world that they don’t have the heart (or the talent) to build a performance car in the same vein as the GT-R or even the Evo X.
There is a big difference between a company that will sweat the details of a $150,000+ car that will reach the hands of maybe 200 owners a year and a company that is willing to sweat the details on a $25,000 car that reach the hands of will over 300,000 owners each year.
You mean like the Lexus LS600hL?
FORGET YOU MISSION AND YOU WILL FAIL!
It’s not like Toyota has to sacrifice future development on the Prius and Corolla to put together the LF-A. If they can spare engineers to specifically develop an engine for Nascar and toss in buckets of money for a F1 effort that goes nowhere, then they have the talent and recources to bring together a car like the LF-A. It’s a shame they don’t have the heart to do it.
Even Volvo wowed us once upon a time with the P1800.
folks really need to learn to tune cars. I think the future may be owned by tuners and knowledgeable folk.
What about the Subaru-based coupe they’re supposedly working on?
A lot of people seem be getting on Toyota’s case about not producing a sports car. I chalk it up to a good business decision, like canceling the GS-F, for example. Maybe if Toyota was in GM’s shoes, they’d be building 538hp Lexuses and a 604hp coupe that costs $109,000.
The LFA as an R&D platform, mentioned by others, might even be reducing R&D costs across the company.
Well, Toyota abandoned the MR2, Supra, and Celica mostly because they weren’t selling well. The last Supra was pretty hardcore, but it arrived just as the bottom was falling out of the high-end Japanese sports car market. The Celica died because its price got out of control for what it offered (a well-equipped GT-S approached $25K, which was just silly) and because it didn’t sell well enough to justify keeping its styling fresh. I assume Toyota would have been more willing to keep investing in those lines if their sales hadn’t tanked.
The MR Spyder was a weird case. It wasn’t user-friendly enough to seriously rival the Miata, but not really sporty enough for the people who like S2000s or Integra Type Rs. And it was funny-looking. I’m not really sure what they were thinking with that one.
Maybe the phenomena of halo cars has turned a tide? Isn’t the Prius and the LS600h worth more as halo cars for Toyota than any sports car could possibly offer? The r&d for the Prius could be written off on pr-value alone. The LS600h rivals the Mercedes S-Class as the default presidential limousine all over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_limousine
No offense to all the people who love supercars and high performance sports cars but
Celica>Supra>LF-A
Toyota needs an affordable sporty coupe.