Official Toyota anime probably not hinting at next-gen Celica, MR2 and Supra

In February Toyota debuted a new anime series, Grip, that was all about fun cars like the GR Corolla, 86 and Supra battling against a world of boring, autonomous cars. The second season is out now, and people have been noticing clues pointing to an exciting slate of five future performance cars not-so-subtly hidden in a frame. Is Toyota trying to tell us something with viral marketing, or did the animators just take some creative liberty?

The scene in question comes at the 0:48 mark in Grip‘s first episode of season two. On a board behind the wise Master Rugu, the anti-autonomous driving sensei of the heroes, is a list of models that includes, Supra Mk6, Celica Mk8, MR2 Mk4, GR86 Mk3, and the GR GT3. Each “Mk” indicates a generation of a model that doesn’t yet exist, even in the futuristic world of Grip.

In the real world, there have been rumors of a sixth-gen Supra and fourth-gen  MR2, and there have been more than rumors about an eighth-gen Celica and GT3 supercar. The list is accompanied by illustrations of an ST165 Celica GT-Four and a the exploded view of a twin-cam four-cylinder engine.

The discovery prompted much excitement around the web, with Road & Track writing, “We’ve just received our best hint yet at the potential future of Toyota’s sports car lineup.” But would Toyota really reveal its entire sports car plan for the next decade in such a throwaway fashion?

Eh, prolly not. Such a revelation would certainly come from the Japanese mothership, and despite its anime style Grip is the creation of Toyota USA’s marketing arm. But even if we didn’t know that marketing firm Intertrend was behind Grip, or that the anime was created by Frank Mele and JaeWoo Kim (whose credits include Tron: Uprising and Ben 10 Omniverse, both American productions), the giveaway is in the “Mk” designation.

That’s a western way of denoting model generations that stemmed from British cars. It got transposed on to Japanese cars in the early tuner days, most notably on the “MKIV” Supra. But no proper enthusiast from Japan would refer to the fourth-gen Supra as the MKIV. They’d call it the A80, after the chassis code (with MKIII being the A70, and so on). They may call it the official Toyota designation of JZA80 that includes the engine family and chassis, or simply refer to it as the “80 Supra”, but not “mark four”.

Following Toyota’s naming convention the next Supra would be called the A100, the next Celica would be TXXX (possibly T280 or T300 seeing as how the Avensis built on the same T-chassis goes up to T270), and the MR2 would be the W40. Yes, these are confusing and not terribly illuminating to the average enthusiast, but in our opinion that would make them even better easter eggs.

None of this pedantry lessens the fun of Grip. Anything that gets the fellow youths look into sports cars over self-driving cars is a good thing. It’s an entertaining series and if the richest, most successful car company in the world wants to take the mantle of performance, we’ll let them cook.

Thanks to Bryan K. for the tip!