Runabout
January 27, 2026
Alex KiersteinToyota’s little kei truck midengine sportscar fakeout was innocuous. Toyota’s plans about future internal combustion cars are serious.
Concepts, rumors, moves that fan rampant speculation. Toyota isn’t hiding its chairperson’s ardent desire for Toyota to make fun cars again, and the GR 86, GR Corolla, and GR Supra don’t seem to be enough for Akio. No, he is eager to plug in that last piece of the affordable sportscar puzzle to reanimate Toyota’s sporty lineup at the zenith of its power: the MR2.
Toyoda seems to have a sense of humor, at least about this sort of thing. Not sure that savvy applies to dabbling in American partisan politics. The Daihatsu kei trucks at the Tokyo Auto Salon were cute, but they didn’t tell us much about any sports car plans. Now, Automotive News has tracked down Gazoo Racing President Tomoya Takahashi and extracted as much detail as you can reasonably expect about future product.
The bottom line: a mid-mounted, internal-combustion-powered sports car is being developed. The G20E in the GR Yaris M offers a preview of the engine. You will not be shocked to learn that Toyoda, as Morizo, helped develop and has competed in the GR Yaris M, and that the engine sits amidships. Sounds like a dress rehearsal for utilizing the engine in a purpose-built sports car that will almost certainly be called the MR2, right?
Takahashi told AN the car is at least 4 or 5 years away, based on where it is in the development cycle. While he indicated in the interview that the goal was to produce a production model, that is a long time from now. As we’ve all seen recently, the regulatory climate and political environment are especially changeable, so who knows?
That said, this does clarify Toyota’s plans. The new G20E and its downsized derivatives will have sporty applications, and Takahashi indicated the modularity of the engines (like the Dynamic Force family, it’ll be adaptable to front, mid, and rear placement and either longitudinal or transverse applications) will extend to electrification. That doesn’t mean the mid-engine car will be a hybrid necessarily; just that the G20E itself will be designed to work with hybrid systems.
I wouldn’t expect anything less. Toyota is in the enviable position of having a massive amount of experience and success developing and selling parallel hybrids. It would be shocking if the new engine family wasn’t able to adapt to electrification. And I would expect the mid-engine car to have a mild-hybrid system, a power-adder as the company has used to improve power on vehicles like the Tundra and Tacoma.
A new midship runabout? Akio Toyoda has loudly and frequently stated that Toyota will not abandon internal combustion engines. What once seemed like a conservative and reactionary reflex to BEV promulgation now seems like a savvy rallying cry to revive a modern classic to.
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