Toyota has had a pretty wild and successful history and in 2013 the company fell just $20,000 shy of crossing the annual sales threshold of more than $10 million. The company is still doing well as of the time of this writing, but it did just recently absorb the Scion brand due to poor sales. Toyota has always been one of the go-to brands for economy cars like the Corolla and the Camry, so the Scion brand didn’t stand much of a chance, but what happened to the days when Toyota had a few exciting cars too? Well, those days might be coming back if Toyota’s lead engineer for the Toyota 86 – Tetsuya Tada – has anything to say about it.
In a recent interview with CarAdvice Tada admitted that he was on a mission to convince Toyota to create a performance division. I know you’re probably thinking “what about TRD?” right? Well TRD is so invested in trucks at the moment that Toyota needs something else. If you don’t believe me, just look at how little TRD did to the 2015 Toyota TRD Corolla, the 2015 Toyota TRD Camry, and the 2016 Toyota Yaris TRD Sportivo – all three were about as disappointing as finding out that your wife is cheating on you. The future may hold something better, though, as Tada wants to absorb Gazoo Racing just like BMW did with M Performance and Audi did with Quattro GmbH.
In the interview with CarAdvice, Tada said, “BMW has its M Division, Mercedes-Benz has Mercedes-AMG, Audi has Quattro GmbH, so they have a stance of a sports car, but Toyota hasn’t. So I would like to build that major sports car brand within Toyota, like BMW’s M. He continued, “BMW and M and Audi and Quattro GmbH used to be like the Toyota relationship with Gazoo—it wasn’t really one body, it was two separate things, but because of the time and the continuous effort, now they are together. So, I’m wishing that Toyota puts effort continuously, and then someday later, Toyota and Gazoo will be one body.”
How can you argue with logic like that? Toyota has become a dull company that provides your everyday family movers, but nothing exciting to brag about. Here’s to hoping that Tada gets his way sooner than later and Toyota either creates a new performance division or absorbs Gazoo.
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