Maybe its my personal vendetta against the tC that leaked out, yes?

I love Toyota sports cars and i got it from my father who always tells me about his 1973 Carina he bought brand new. Alas, that car has gone to a better place (it was dispatched by a wayward looking grandma in a Detroit land yacht…) but the passion he has for the cars was passed to me. maybe that’s why i got so upset as i grew closer to license age and watched as Toyota ceased to build so many great cars…

but for us toyota folk
we go way back with the big T

were diehard fans and are really aware of there racing heritage.
so i still say scions are lame and toyota is wasting their time.
like i said, ditch the roller skates and overgrown toasters and bring the legends back.

@ Oyaji Gaijin… Well said! You were able to put into words what I quite couldn’t.

Perhaps with Mr. Toyoda at the reigns, Toyota will move ahead in some new directions. In today’s economy all the car manufacturers are re-thinking their products, but what the future will bring is anyone’s guess. While it’s great to reflect on the past, it’s not practical to bring it back as is often suggested. However, to take design cues, and performance ideas and incorporate their essence into a new and exciting product is something feasible. Let’s hope that Toyota’s direction will include a little excitement and cars built with emotion.

I brought up the Scion example only to point out that Toyota has managed to create some enthusiasm with small, affordable cars.

The weight issue and selling a stripped down car to benefit both price and performance, will be an issue. Toyota products have gotten fairly heavy over the years. That sturdy and dependable reputation which was earned by such overbuilt things like using 1/4 inch sheet metal in the center console of a Camry adds a lot of weight. The comparably sized Toyota made Scion TC weighs 3,000 pounds. The Mini claimed the lightest weight car on the market at 2,500 pounds. This may be an indication that the safety requirements pushed up the minimum weight of a steel car and it isn’t possible to make a steel car any lighter. The US version of the Elise weighs 2,000 pounds, which is what the original Corolla Hatchback weighed. The Elise omits things like AC, cloth, carpet, sound deadening, folding seats, and it’s made of some pretty expensive bonded composite materials. The people here would drive a car without any interior, no cup holders, heck, if you add a roll cage that would just be something to brag about. But that narrows the market for the car by a lot, and you aren’t going to sell something like a Toyota small car built with the materials and features of a Lotus Elise to your average person, who wants a big hole for their big gulp, AC that causes icicles, and excessive sound deadening so they can’t hear all the people honking at them while they devote all their attention to their cell phone and none of their attention to the cars they are running off the road. Also, ignore the composite material pushing the price of an affordable car up into the $50,000+ range.
The economic situation would have to get a lot worse, and we would have to be back to Hoover Towns and soup lines for quite a while before the buying public would accept the idea of a stripped down car. That’s what the Tata is, and look at the comments about that car.

My suggestion would be that they could put some emotion in the cars they sell now, not resolve to sell boring cars until some time in the remote future, when they think they can afford to build cars with emotion.

the Scion tC is a nice car. its comfortable easy to drive and has some customability while still being affordable… but as a 23 year old kid, i see my friends making payments on these things and dumping all sorts of money (Superchargers, suspension, wheels brakes) into them for nothing. a Scion tC will not ever be exciting to drive. even Toyota themselves admitted this when they had to convert one to RWD to enter it in a drift competition. they aren’t fooling anyone, they don’t built any sports cars and they certainly don’t build any car with passion or heart anymore. the difference between my 112 hp MR2 and my friend’s much faster tC is that the MR2 is actually fun to drive, it doesn’t feel like a loud commuter car. i’m not saying that the tc can’t be a nostalgic someday, i’m saying it will be only because Toyota makes no other alternative.

Bring on the 086a!