2020 Toyota Supra

Price as tested: $56,000

Engine/Power/Torque: 3.0 Liter turbo I6/335/362

0-60: 3.8 Seconds

Text/Video: Yousef Alvi // Photography: Alexander Grant

Welcome to the most divisive vehicle of this year…or hell this decade.  The 2020 Supra debut should have been an occasion marked with joy and excitement but social media and internet trolls being who they are sullied the occasion.  In the minds of the ‘negative’ minded…the Supra is nothing but a BMW in drag.  But to those people, I have one thing to say ‘Get your heads out of your collective asses’

Let me put it succinctly.  The 2020 Supra drives so well that I don’t care if it was built by Yugo and it has a Saturn badge on the hood. At the end of the day…it’s just a fantastic sports car.  That’s the key word here people ‘sports car’.  We live in an era where no one really makes sports cars anymore.  So any new model that arrives should be greeted with full embrace and not half hearted smirks.  Because the alternative is much more scary.  

What Toyota could have done is make a two row Highlander, slap a ‘Sports’ badge on the back of it and money would rain down from the heavens. But Toyota didn’t do that…they entered back into a market filled with petty, arrogant and cheap people which will in turn make the Supra a probable loss leader for the company. So Toyota doesn’t go out of business, they decided to spread the incoming loss with another make like they did with the GT86. Toyota also isn’t stupid, they know how to make money and not lose it.  

So if you’re making a new sports car (a low volume one because people suck) why not share the development costs with someone else?  It’s just smart business.  And if you’re going to share development of a new sports car…why wouldn’t you go with BMW?  The ingredients are there already.  A solid and beautifully tunable turbo straight 6 and a stout and well loved transmission is there for the pickings.  Along with the fact that BMW needed to update the Z4 anyway and you have a match made in manufacturing heaven.  You take the best parts from BMW and add Toyota design language, tuning and pricing.  You have a winner.  

The interior is another issue so called enthusiasts are complaining about.  ‘It even has iDrive!’ they yell  Uhhhh…has anyone used Toyota’s Entune?  I have and on numerous vehicles…it’s crap.  iDrive is light years better…and it has wireless CarPlay!  The rest of the interior is beautifully adorned and comfortable but a bit dark since visibility is a bit nill.  Ride quality is outstanding and build quality is bank vault tight.

But you are not here to read about the interior. You are here to read about the way it drives…and it drives amazing. The Supra is a born and bred sports car. The steering is telepathic, direct and analog. The Supra just seeks out the next corner like a bloodhunt on the hunt. The Supra just grips, grips and grips some more. The mechanical grip is nothing short of outstanding! The power from the BMW B58 comes on boil at any given RPM and doesn’t let up until almost 7k RPM. All of that rides a wave of snaps, crackles and pops from the exhaust that sounds like a demonic bowl of rice krispies!

So what do I think of the 2020 Toyota Supra? It’s the best sports car on the market right now and the legend of the Supra is safe…so stop complaining.