Toyota will roll out a matte black sports car concept at the Tokyo Motor Show that the company hopes will remind us of the company’s endurance racing sports cars that came within half a lap of winning the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The GR HV Sports is a two-seat, targa roof sports car with a proper front engine, rear drive arrangement. The concept’s name refers to Gazoo Racing, Toyota’s sports car racing team, and to the fact that, like the race car, it is a hybrid vehicle.
The GR HV Sports is about six inches longer and about an inch wider than today’s Toyota 86 sports car, and unlike today’s similarly proportioned production model, the concept car has no back seat.
The transmission is an unusual automatic with the option of changing gears through a traditional six-speed H-pattern shifter. As an automatic, presumably there is no clutch pedal to operate during those shifts. We have seen a true six-speed manual transmission hybrid before in Honda’s two-seat Insight and CR-Z hybrids, but those cars were front-drive economy cars and not true rear-drive sports cars.
Toyota designers hid the CR HV Sports’ start button beneath a pop-up cover on the shift knob.
Technical details, such as whether the CR HV Sports concept uses the Subaru boxer four-cylinder engine like the 86 does remain to be provided at the official introduction at the auto show later in the month.
