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Originally Posted by Red Bread
Haha, so winning isn't their goal?
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Not always, no.
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Originally Posted by Red Bread
And yes, 2000GT is a glorious thing, but more of an LFA sort of experiment, not really a successful sports car.
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Point taken. But it took that exercise and a couple others to convince Datsun to make the 240z, which is arguably as important a sports car as the Corvette is in overall automotive history.[/QUOTE]
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Originally Posted by Red Bread
And in what world was a Probe comparable to a Supra?!
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None. I was comparing it to the Celica, which was an extremely successful car for Toyota. So was the MR2. Note that I included the Eclipse and not the 3000GT/Stealth as part of the comparison, and the 300ZX was a crossover; the twin turbo version was the only one that really competed with those other cars you mention.
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Originally Posted by Red Bread
If you're some anti American car weirdo, you can exclude it, but nearly every consumer did. l cross shop them and certainly as the dollar to yen tanked, consumers lost the value proposition of the Mk4.
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Not an anti-american weirdo, but someone who thinks globally, understands how the Japanese performance car differs from those from other parts of the world, defines performance and success broadly, and recognizes the value of a niche market readily.
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Originally Posted by Red Bread
Primary point being that they've never really had a wildly successful sports car. No Miata, no Corvette, not even a Z car type success. You're right that the Celica (even though it moved from rwd to fwd) was probably the longest tenured, but it was always a weird thing and nearly always someone else was making a better version of it.
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Yet Toyota is the world's largest automotive company. Is that not successful? Point being: Toyota didn't have to rely on a hyper-successful sports car that slayed everything that competed with it to outdo, say, Honda. Toyota takes the broad view. That has its pitfalls, yes (again: look at Honda), but it also can be looked at as hedging its bets. Everything Toyota does revolves around its consumer products. That's the most important thing to remember about it vs. (again?!) Honda, which has crashed and burned in a number of endeavors, and (OK!) Chevrolet, which couldn't build a high-quality consumer car to save it life for a solid 20 years in the 1980s and 90s.