Sciaru BRZFRS (BreezeFrees)

  • Thread starter Azuremen
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That BR-Z looks like it’s having loads of fun
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Jalopnik is gonna have a field day if the wagon turns out to be true... then proceed to complain about it not coming stateside where they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
 
Yeah but Jalopnik is even less relevant than Kotaku nowadays. I was always hoping that the rumors for the Lexus version would have held true though.
 
3 Cylinder turbo manual to the back wheels, LMP style hybrid system to the front. Please.

The nose is long enough, engine small enough and technology good enough for this to be a thing. Drive to work on EV power, turn it off to do tofu deliveries, turn it to 11 for track action.

Probably end up an $85k AUD car, (GR Corolla is $68k) but as a grown up sedan with very trick tech I think there’s a market there.
 
Hayden
3 Cylinder turbo manual to the back wheels, LMP style hybrid system to the front. Please.

The nose is long enough, engine small enough and technology good enough for this to be a thing. Drive to work on EV power, turn it off to do tofu deliveries, turn it to 11 for track action.

Probably end up an $85k AUD car, (GR Corolla is $68k) but as a grown up sedan with very trick tech I think there’s a market there.
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GR86 Prime plug-in hybrid sports sedan. Boom.
 
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Just make it EV and be done with it. The engine was never its selling point. It was just suitably shaped/packaged for the type of car they were going for.

Making it electric at the front just ads extra weight and complications.
 
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TheCracker
Just make it EV and be done with it. The engine was never its selling point. It was just suitably shaped/packaged for the type of car they were going for.

Making it electric at the front just ads extra weight and complications.
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But it doesn't. Toyota's hybrid systems are better and more reliable than anybody else's in the industry. Plus, making a GR86 electric at the front would simply be reversing the new Prius which offers electric AWD at the rear. Obviously the car would have to be a completely new integrated chassis but that's what they already do when they design a new Prius or other car with planned hybrid integration. Hybrids are one thing Toyota truly does better than anybody else, they should absolutely lean into it rather than going EV. Plus, EV sports cars are as yet completely unproven in the market. Toyota doesn't do unproven things.

 
TheCracker
Just make it EV and be done with it. The engine was never its selling point. It was just suitably shaped/packaged for the type of car they were going for.

Making it electric at the front just ads extra weight and complications.
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Strong disagree. Full BEV would require at least a 75kwh battery to have enough range to sell and that would likely push the weight over 4,000lbs. A "prime" PHEV with 15-20 mile range could use a 10kwh battery and with careful design (and the lighter 3cylinder) probably be under 3200lbs. A BEV GR86 loses the point much further than a PHEV GR86. I often see complaints about PHEVs being too complicated, but they are no more complicated than a normal hybrid and Toyota has emphatically proven the reliability of those.
 
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't Toyota's recent experimentation with Hydrogen strongly suggest that they themselves aren't keen on going full EV?
 
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Eunos_Cosmo
It's more explicit than that. Toyota chairman boldly claims electric cars will never dominate, says hybrids are the better option.

I strongly agree with the sentiment, at least until battery technology has some kind of generational leap.
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Well ok, straight from the Horse's mouth then.

I've always had a feeling even a decade ago that we are in no position to go all electric with the fossil fuel structure all over the place, charging stations not all that plentiful and Batteries seemingly not making that much progress. Still seems to be the case even now.
 
RACECAR
Well ok, straight from the Horse's mouth then.

I've always had a feeling even a decade ago that we are in no position to go all electric with the fossil fuel structure all over the place, charging stations not all that plentiful and Batteries seemingly not making that much progress. Still seems to be the case even now.
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I've had that feeling too, and it gives me some conflict. On the one hand I recognize the potential for EVs to reduce emissions, which I think is critical, but on the other hand I don't believe the implementation has been very...clever. Even the best EVs (or maybe particularly the best) carry around way way more battery than they need 95% of the time. Its extraordinarily wasteful usage of materials that are not easy nor particularly green to extract from the earth. 10 PHEVs (if used correctly) are going to offset significantly more emissions than 1 long range BEV for the same amount of battery material. I've gone off topic.
 
Eunos_Cosmo
Strong disagree. Full BEV would require at least a 75kwh battery to have enough range to sell and that would likely push the weight over 4,000lbs. A "prime" PHEV with 15-20 mile range could use a 10kwh battery and with careful design (and the lighter 3cylinder) probably be under 3200lbs. A BEV GR86 loses the point much further than a PHEV GR86. I often see complaints about PHEVs being too complicated, but they are no more complicated than a normal hybrid and Toyota has emphatically proven the reliability of those.
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The heaviest 2024 Prius with AWD weighs less than 3,600 pounds which isn't that bad considering the Nimh battery. And the Nimh batteries seem to be much more reliable in cold weather and long-term.
 
Eunos_Cosmo
Strong disagree. Full BEV would require at least a 75kwh battery to have enough range to sell and that would likely push the weight over 4,000lbs. A "prime" PHEV with 15-20 mile range could use a 10kwh battery and with careful design (and the lighter 3cylinder) probably be under 3200lbs. A BEV GR86 loses the point much further than a PHEV GR86. I often see complaints about PHEVs being too complicated, but they are no more complicated than a normal hybrid and Toyota has emphatically proven the reliability of those.
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Keef
But it doesn't. Toyota's hybrid systems are better and more reliable than anybody else's in the industry. Plus, making a GR86 electric at the front would simply be reversing the new Prius which offers electric AWD at the rear. Obviously the car would have to be a completely new integrated chassis but that's what they already do when they design a new Prius or other car with planned hybrid integration. Hybrids are one thing Toyota truly does better than anybody else, they should absolutely lean into it rather than going EV. Plus, EV sports cars are as yet completely unproven in the market. Toyota doesn't do unproven things.
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Sure, you can't argue that Toyota doesn't have the credibility and knowledge to build it as a PHEV and it already has a suitable engine from the GR Yaris, but i still think it would add substantial weight and perhaps more importantly the packaging and placement of that weight over the current gen.

BMW's i8 uses a similar short range battery and motor with a 3cylinder ICE to make it a 992 rival. But to keep its weight competitive it has a CF passenger cell. You can't go that exotic with a $32-40k car.
 
TheCracker
Sure, you can't argue that Toyota doesn't have the credibility and knowledge to build it as a PHEV and it already has a suitable engine from the GR Yaris, but i still think it would add substantial weight and perhaps more importantly the packaging and placement of that weight over the current gen.

BMW's i8 uses a similar short range battery and motor with a 3cylinder ICE to make it a 992 rival. But to keep its weight competitive it has a CF passenger cell. You can't go that exotic with a $32-40k car.
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The I8 is not a small car, and it has 4 seats and is a pretty luxurious package. I don't think they went far out of their way to make it super light. The I8's battery weighed 100kg and was around 10kwh. That's a density of 10kg/kwh. Remember, the all-carbon and non-electrified Ford GT also weighed over 3,000lbs.

Tesla's P100D battery weighed 625kg for 100kwh for a density of 6.25kg/kwh

If you use the current state of the art (its another subject on whether or not Toyota would go Li or not) you could get a 10kwh battery at around 70kg (154lbs) I'd guess.

Now if we take the FA24 engine - it's a good engine in terms of having low CG, but it's inefficient in that it has 2 heads, 4 cams, etc since it has two "banks" of cylinders. It's NOT a light engine, somewhere north of 420lbs without the transmission from what I can find. The Yaris GR engine weighs just 240lbs!

240lb engine + 154lb battery = 394lbs. If we add in the electric motor, we're probably a little more than the FA24, but not drastically so. The 3 cylinder is great for packaging, and if the platform is designed from the onset as a PHEV, I'm guessing Toyota could find a performance-enhancing place to mount the battery. I would actually prefer the hypothetical PHEV to operate both in series and parallel so that you could run on EV only or use the motor to boost the ICE low end torque in kill mode - all power going to the rear wheels.

So we would end up with a car that is not much heavier than the current one, but with potentially more centralized mass, and critically, more room for better suspension geometry up front (that FA24 is a wide boy).

edit: fixed typos
 
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TheCracker
Sure, you can't argue that Toyota doesn't have the credibility and knowledge to build it as a PHEV and it already has a suitable engine from the GR Yaris, but i still think it would add substantial weight and perhaps more importantly the packaging and placement of that weight over the current gen.

BMW's i8 uses a similar short range battery and motor with a 3cylinder ICE to make it a 992 rival. But to keep its weight competitive it has a CF passenger cell. You can't go that exotic with a $32-40k car.
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I need to make some corrections.

The 2023 Prius Prime has 220hp combined, weights just over 3,500 pounds, and has a 10.9 kWh Li-ion battery (their trucks still use NiMH) with an EV range of 39 miles, and fuel economies of 48 mpg engine-only and 114 mpge, all precisely within that price range you mention.

In comparison the 2016 - old, early-adopter technology - i8 made 228hp from the engine with a max of 357 (apparently they didn't know how to calculate combined power back then), weighed 3484 pounds in American trim, had a 7.1 kWh Li-ion, EV range of 16 miles per the Car and Driver test, with fuel economies of 28 and 76. And cost $150,000.

The i8 really shows how limited technology was back then. The thing was ridiculously inefficient - the current GR86 actually gets better highway mileage than an i8 does - and illustrates how far BMW had to go to try and make it an effective hybrid sports car because that technology didn't exist at all within their portfolio.

That's very unlike Toyota where the technology to make this work has existed for 25 years and is currently baked into half their offerings in the US. Obviously the GR is meant to focus on simplicity and light weight fun, but a sports sedan version of that would be able to sacrifice that in the name of added comfort. Obviously a new chassis would be required to fully integrate the hybrid option but simply adding the hybrid system to the current engine would make incredible gains without too much weight gain. The car weighs 700 pounds less than the Prius Prime, so there's a lot of engineering leeway there.
 
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