Toyota Wants To Work With Porsche To Make The Next MR2

Last year, I wrote about the hopeful return of the Toyota MR2. Since then we’ve heard very little about the apparent second coming of the iconic mid-engined sports car.

With the revival of the GT86 and eventually the Supra (with the help from BMW), expectations have been high for other historical cars from Toyota’s long timeline to make a return, but now it sounds as though Toyota are beginning to look in another direction. We’ve heard rumour of hybrid powertrains and NSX levels of performance, but one of Toyota’s Chief Engineers, Tetsuya Tada, has given us extremely high hopes.

He’s told AutoIndustriya that he’s interested in working with Porsche to produce the next MR2. This is extremely exciting, as we know Porsche’s rich motorsport pedigree could very well be inserted into an excellent chassis from Toyota. And with the Taycan roaring through the media like a bull in a post office, we know Porsche are interested in electrification and promoting the fact.

Toyota’s recent joint venture with BMW shows its enthusiasm for joining forces to make something better, while driving costs down (excuse the pun), so with enough push from the market and internal powers, this could possibly come to fruition.

However, as we’re still getting over the release of the new Supra, despite many buyers still not actually receiving them yet, we will have to wait. Toyota don’t want to turn the light away from their halo car until sales have slowed, especially as the addition of a medium-performance mid-engined sports car to its stock may very well knock the Supra down a peg or two. There are still higher performance editions of the Supra to come, plus Gazoo Racing editions of a number of existing Toyotas.

There are plans in the pipeline to introduce high-performance variants of all models in the future… Watch this space!

— ToyotaUK (@ToyotaUK) February 21, 2019

It could be a long wait, but if a new MR2 is on the books with input from Porsche, it could very well be worth it.