Toyota GT86 has left the dealerships and we here to remember what a great car it was and what great decade it had. Our opinion of the GT86, as well as the Subaru BRZ, didn’t change much even after 10 years.
At that time, we believed it will be called the FT-86, and though the name changed, its quality and remained the same. Toyota said at that time that the key in the vehicle’s development is that it’s a rear-drive, front-engined car. A car is only fun if you are able to control it. The firm doesn’t like the idea of developing a car using numbers.
The car did great that year and the next, and it became a superstar. We, especially, loved it. It’s only obvious that many magazines named it one of the cars of the year. We became extremely habituated to it, but by 2019, we knew it’s close to its end. We wrote then that minimal mass gives you a lot of advantages. Yes, its engine makes some noise, but it enables you to carry speed and get entertained by the steering response, things that are absent in the Supra. It actually shows you how good its chassis is, but apparently, it wasn’t the focus then. And, it’s not like we don’t appreciate Supra, but even its newer version can’t match up to the GT86, even though it costs much more.
The vehicle is gone now as well as the BRZ. It was one of the best cars of the last decade and we celebrate its existence. When we talked with Tada, the chief programmer engineer of Toyota and he said similar things. Things would have been different if GT86s had sold a million units, but it was the engineers’ creativity that justified its limited volumes. We drove the post-facelift car, whose 2017 updates only focused on the interior and exterior. We drove it for the last time and you know how it felt.