We live in an automated world where we couldn’t be bothered to do much of anything manually anymore. People have even taken to e-mailing and messaging others in the next room, rather than exerting their vocal cords. I, for one, can’t even remember the last time I took the trouble to write out a note by hand. In fact, I don’t even know if my writing would still be legible, it’s been that long – that is, of course, if you could go so far as to call it legible in the first place.
The worrying part for me, though, is that this trend seems to be extending to our cars far faster that I’m comfortable with. Automatic transmissions or cruise control are one thing, but apparently autonomous cars courtesy of M2M (machine-to-machine) communication aren’t far off either. But there is still a glimmer of hope yet in a world adamant to render the driver obsolete, and it comes from an unlikely source – Toyota.
The Toyota GT86 flies in the face of the current trend of cars in which the driver is considered a necessary evil. And the GT86 just happens to be everything I want in an everyday car – it’s reasonably priced, reliable, rear-wheel drive and, most importantly, comes with a manual transmission. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my quest for old-school motoring. The GT86 has demonstrated that quite a few people around the world still want to endure the trouble of driving themselves – and have the gall to enjoy themselves while they’re at it as well. So much so that waiting lists in some parts of the world for the GT86 have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous – to the tune of years, and not merely months.
The story of how this amazing car came to be is told by chief engineer, Tetsuya Tada, to Andrew English of the Telegraph, and is posted on Toyota’s own blog, titled ‘Tada: How Toyota and Subaru created the GT86.’ A Google search is highly recommended. It’s an amazing story of how this honest-to-goodness sports car was conceived.
Essentially, the Toyota board commissioned a sports car to rekindle interest in the brand, which had become synonymous with the mundane (read: Corolla and Camry). But, when the concept was presented, it was almost stillborn resulting from the initial line of questioning, which was in keeping with what Tada san and his engineering colleagues across the industry refer to as the “Devil’s cycle of increased power and weight.” The first questions were, “how fast and how much power?” And that was missing the point of the GT86 completely!
Fortunately, the engineers at Toyota and Subaru persevered. The blog tells a beautiful story of faith, teamwork, and collaboration, which resulted in a car that exceeded all expectations – by a conservative factor of approximately 10,000. The implications of which are not to be scoffed at either, as most major OEM’s are now looking at creating their own derivative of this age-old, but almost forgotten, basic recipe for a fun car. So, there could well be a glimmer of hope for a stick-shifting, heel-and-toeing, counter-steering vestige of the automotive past such as myself.
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