The current Toyota Supra is already on the way out with the Final Edition marking the end of the Mk5’s six-year production run in the US. It was fun while it lasted. But don’t expect the Supra name to be out of the Toyota lineup for long.
In a recent interview with MotorTrend, Toyota has suggested that a new Supra will indeed happen. Better yet, this new one shouldn’t take as long to hit the market as the Mk5 did. Hopefully.
Photo by: Toyota
“It would be logical that we would have a next-gen Supra. But when and how is still TBD,” said senior vice president of Product Planning and Strategy for Toyota Motor North America, Cooper Ericksen. “Definitely there will be a gap. The question is how big will that gap be… It is our goal to have a gap that is significantly less [than the last one].”
Lest you forget, the Mk4 Supra ended production in the US in 1998, which means it took 21 years for Toyota to revive the Supra name in the US. Thankfully, Toyota promises that we won’t have to wait another two decades for the next one.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see a new Supra next year—or even the year after. Ericksen noted that Toyota still has its “hands full” producing core products like the latest RAV4 and the ever-popular Camry, among others.
It’s also unclear if the next Supra will be a jointly developed project like the current one, which Toyota produced alongside BMW’s Z4.
“A product like Supra, it’s made it to a point where now we have a Final Edition, and the reason is it’s just not cost-effective with all the new regulations and investment we have to make,” Erickson noted. “It needs to be a new house. When we can get the new house built is the question.”
We’ll just have to wait and see.
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