By now, you’ve probably heard of BMW’s joint venture with Toyota to build a sports car together. Both brands have been working on a sports car platform together and will both be debuting their own car from it. For BMW, that car will be the upcoming Z4 roadster. For Toyota, it will be the next-gen Supra. We knew that both cars would share similar chassis and technologies, but it seems they will share some powertrain bits, as well.
Continue Reading Below
From some recent spy photos that have surface, we can see the interior of the new Supra (We don’t own the photos but they can be seen here). In these photos, the shift level is visible and it’s clearly a BMW-sourced automatic gear lever. That means that the Supra will likely be using a ZF-sourced eight-speed auto with BMW’s electronics. That’s actually good news, though, as BMW has been praised for programming the ZF8 gearbox better than anyone else, really. What’s also interesting is it seems like it will also have a variant of BMW’s iDrive system, as the massive dash-mounted screen looks eerily similar to BMW’s. Plus, an iDrive rotary controller can be seen on the console. But that steering wheel looks like a Toyota unit, so this isn’t the BMW Z4 we’re looking at.
From this Autocar report, we’re also hearing that the Supra will pack a BMW petrol engine (possibly the B58?) mated to an electric motor with supercapacitors storing the energy. This will give it a mild hybrid setup and some added low-down torque, completely eliminating turbo-lag.
The upcoming Toyota Supra should excite many BMW and Toyota fans. Being based on the upcoming BMW Z4, the Supra will have a lot of lightweight materials on board, such as aluminum and carbon fiber, making it light and rigid. Accompany that with rear-wheel drive, a BMW I6 and a ZF8 gearbox and that’s a pretty good recipe for a sports car. The lack of manual option is disappointing, but sports cars with the ZF8 are still very fun to drive and this shouldn’t be any different.
Plus, in these spy photos, the car looks very good. It has all of the typical Supra proportions plus a double-bubble roof. C’mon, how can you not love that?
[Source: Autocar]
This is very nice, but what does BMW get in return, other than brand erosion?
Most of the public won’t make the connection. I see no resemblance between the X1 & MINI, for instance.
What’s the connection between X1 and MINI? X1 has a longer wheelbase from what I can tell.
UKL platform.
Next alliance should be between Bmw and McLaren.
BMW and Porsche.
Porsche are too busy rebadging VWs.
No, they aren’t. You clearly have no idea what Porsche is doing.
If they’re like the rest of VAG they’re going to court (or prison).
They’re not. Clearly.
Then why are they being investigated?
Looking forward to when Toyota announces that in most of the world outside Japan this new car will be sold as a Lexus and that the model designation will follow the Lexus scheme of two letters and three digits. Only then will all the automotive journalists stop spewing nonsense about the “new Supra”. Its been going on for more than ten years, and it got a whole lot worse after the old Supra was featured in one of those silly car movies. I used to own an actual, genuine Supra, back in the 1980s, and I grew tired of all this silliness about the “new Supra” more than a decade ago. It has been one of the very silliest phenomena I ever witnessed. For it to make one whit of sense for any motoring enthusiast to utter a word about the “new Supra”, Toyota would first need to issue a formal announcement stating that they plan to market a new car using the Supra name and sell it through the Toyota dealership network as a Toyota. I’m pretty sure that if Toyota had ever done that, the automotive journalists would have told us about it.
I read that its going to be DCT. ?
Not even the option of a manual transmission in a car like this?!