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Edit: double post
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Sciaru BRZFRS (BreezeFrees)
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Funny I felt that last gen the BRZ looked better than the Toyota but this gen the GR86 definitely looks better, mostly the grill and front vents. At 9:02 in this video you can hear the car rev.
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I'm kinda stuck because I like the front of the GR 86 a fair bit better (no stupid licence plate mount), but like the way the interior was handled in the BRZ more as well as the color keyed mirrors and it sounds like the suspension is better sorted on the BRZ as well.
I'm mixed on the ducktail spoiler; leaning towards preferring it.
I'm mixed on the ducktail spoiler; leaning towards preferring it.
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Keef
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I find it necessary because for whatever reason Toyota refused to give this thing a stylish fastback and instead gave it a weird shelf trunklid ass. That's my primary gripe with all these cars is the horrible attempt at "coupe" proportions. Its trunklid is as coupe-like as a Corolla.
The ducktail is basically necessary to give this thing decent coupe proportions. Even this low camera angle which extends the roof still doesn't compensate for the poor design:
The problem is that the C-pillar ends before the rear wheel arch. And that ain't right. That ain't how it's done. The primary competition does it better:
The legends do it better:
Even Toyota's own fam does it better:
The GT86 has the same "coupe" proportions as a Chevrolet Cavalier. Weak front end, "cab forward" design, C-pillar ending before the rear wheel arch, and a weird shelf ass. Prove me wrong.
I like the face of this new car but I just can't get over some of the crappy graphical treatments and the horrible proportions.
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I find it necessary because for whatever reason Toyota refused to give this thing a stylish fastback and instead gave it a weird shelf trunklid ass. That's my primary gripe with all these cars is the horrible attempt at "coupe" proportions. Its trunklid is as coupe-like as a Corolla.
The ducktail is basically necessary to give this thing decent coupe proportions. Even this low camera angle which extends the roof still doesn't compensate for the poor design:
The problem is that the C-pillar ends before the rear wheel arch. And that ain't right. That ain't how it's done. The primary competition does it better:
The legends do it better:
Even Toyota's own fam does it better:
The GT86 has the same "coupe" proportions as a Chevrolet Cavalier. Weak front end, "cab forward" design, C-pillar ending before the rear wheel arch, and a weird shelf ass. Prove me wrong.
I like the face of this new car but I just can't get over some of the crappy graphical treatments and the horrible proportions.
Ok so the mission of the 86 is to provide an engaging, fun, and low cost sports car that has a useful interior. All of those goals inform the eventual design of the car. The basic proportions are dictated by the powertrain layout and platform design - an H4 engine is quite short, and making the nose unnecessarily long was not going to be good for chassis dynamics. The interior needs to have a back seat so you can't shove the greenhouse over the rear axle. The other cars you posted have different missions, and in the case of the Mustang and Lexus, styling & aesthetics was probably job #1 (not to mention fitting a range of different engines). In the case of the 86, I don't mind the compact proportions at all really because I know they exist to provide a short wheelbase, front engine rear wheel drive car that also has a useful interior. As far as the trunk...I can't be certain, but I would guess that a hatch opening has a far larger impact on structural rigidity than the much smaller and outside-of-the-wheelbase trunk opening.
Put another way, achieving long-nose short deck proportions on an 86 would have made for either a greenhouse pushed further back (a lot less useful) for the same wheelbase or if you instead keep the greenhouse and front overhang the way it is, then the wheelbase is going to extend, weight is going to go up and you start messing with what the 86 is actually designed to be....fun.
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The Supra looks just as hideous from profile as it does from every other angle (and you want to talk proportions, don't forget to talk about the front overhang that rivals that of a 90s GM car because of how badly matched the wheelbase is to the body), everything in front of the A-Pilar of the RC is a misshapen mess that doesn't fit the rest of the profile of the car, the Mustang looks like it somehow weighs even more than it actually does from the side because of how much of a pillbox the greenhouse is and the Miata does look a bit sharper but famously has no interior space and had to stop being a convertible for the second gen PHRT and adopt the fastback profile because the roof couldn't actually fit in the trunk anymore. I don't think "arguably doesn't looks as good as an Aston Martin" or "sacrificed style to have even the slightest bit of practicality compared to a Miata" is that much of a stick to beat it with. The main thing I wish style-wise for the car vs quibbling over the front end differences was that the hoodline was even lower than it is, like on a C4/C5 Corvette or Miata; but that's probably hard-capped by it using struts in the front.
The reason I'm actually not sure about the ducktail is because ducktail spoilers are hard to implement without them looking tacky from the rear.
The reason I'm actually not sure about the ducktail is because ducktail spoilers are hard to implement without them looking tacky from the rear.
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Keef
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None of this is a good explanation for why it looks dumb. If I wanted something that looks dumb but accomplishes its mission then I'd get a Prius.
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I think you can't see past your own classicist prejudices.
The GREightySix is a neat, unique car doing it's own thang. If they were to change the proportions just for aesthetics, that would transcend looking dumb into being dumb. If I could have the option, I would rather the compact body was configured more like the Alfa Romeo 1750 GTV / Datsun 510 / Nissan IDX type 3-box shape....but absolutely nobody buys that form factor anymore. If it is a sporty car, it has to look like a real sports car.
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That would just be the current Camaro if it was actually as small as the interior suggests it is.
Incidentally:
I literally just realized that this is the reason I never thought the C6 looked as good as the cars that preceded it; the base model in particular.
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Keef
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I feel you, I'm partly just having a laugh. I definitely understand the "has to look like a sports car" thing but again I believe this is down to proportions. While the fastback shape is almost always associated with sports cars because it basically guarantees correct proportions, the idea of a "coupe" roofline has varied all over the place and is done poorly fairly often. The GR86 is not a fastback, it's a coupe, just as much as a Toyota Solara is a coupe, which means it's a bad one.I think you can't see past your own classicist prejudices.
But since you brought up practical 3-box shapes, I assume because those cars all combine sport with useful interiors and trunks, I'd like to highlight that all of them actually look better and have sportier coupe proportions than the GR86, proving to me that it's the proportions that define a sporty shape, not simply a swoopy roofline. All of these cars below 3-box shapes but have better proportions than the GR because of their sedan-based long roofs:
All of these cars have a long roof and a C-pillar that more-or-less ends at the rear of the wheel arch. The cars look hunkered down, the greenhouse appears to be pushed far backward even though the doors are closer to the front wheels than the rear wheels. It's all due to proper coupe proportions which the 86 lacks. The GreatySix's C-pillar doesn't even look like it makes it past the rear tire, the roof appears to end long before the rear wheel begins, and the rear haunches and fender bulge appears to be in a different zip code than the rest of the car. Even this car's own predecessor has a proper coupe design:
All of these proper 3-box coupes are evidence that, actually, the GR86 is not a practical, useful coupe. Somehow they've designed it to look like a fastback but made the rear of the car six inches too long to actually be a fastback, but also not extended the roofline enough to either make it look like a proper coupe or to give the rear seat enough headroom to be useful. They tried too hard and missed both marks.
I'm not sure how I feel about nobody buying 3-box coupes anymore. That one is hard to judge because nobody makes 3-box coupes anymore. I'm not sure why. Is it because they stopped selling? Is it because people just bought the sedan instead? Especially when it comes to the E36 M3, the sedan and coupe have nearly the exact same shape. It seems to me that all the "coupes" on the market have actually migrated to fastback designs, the Mustang being the absolute prime example - big car, four seats, definitive fastback proportions, and that is the Mustang's entire identity. Whereas the Mustang has always been a fastback, the M3 Coupe/M4 has always been a 3-box coupe until recently. I'd argue that even the F80 M4 was a 3-box coupe with an extended 2+2 roofline...
...but now even the G80 M4 has transitioned to a fastback. And it's not because the F80 coupe didn't sell, that's for sure. I don't have an explanation for this shift, but I personally don't believe it's because "3-box coupes don't sell". I think manufacturers have literally manufactured this shift for some reason. The reason 3-box coupes aren't more popular is simply because they don't exist anymore. Coupes don't exist anymore - it's only fastbacks and sedans, or sedan fastbacks. Everything that is called a coupe these days isn't a coupe, it's a fastback.
The GR86 has a fastback roofline on a coupe body and it looks dumb. I would also immediately go buy a Nissan IDx @R1600Turbo because that is what a coupe is supposed to look like. The GR86 is a mishmash of different things that don't work.
Edit: @Tornado you're right, the Camaro and Challenger might be the only 3-box 2+2 coupes left on the market. I can't comment on the Challenger - it does exactly what it was supposed to do, which is have the same donkey hanging off the back as most American 60s/70s cars did - but the Camaro pulls off the coupe design really well. The reason it doesn't sell isn't because it doesn't look good, and isn't because 3-box coupes are inherently bad, but because looking good is literally the only thing it can do.
I mean look at this thing, you can't tell if it's going backwards or forwards:
It looks like an 8-series.
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The Camaro & Challenger don't quite hit the 3-box coupe thing for me. The Camaro is a tad too rakish & squinty (the previous model was a bit better in this regard, but way too fat) and the Challenger is a Land Yacht. Both of them are also so self-referential that they can't pull off the ubiquity part that I find charming about 3-box shapes. The only one I can think of is the BMW 2 series and it only survives because it's a niche unto itself. The latest one looks pretty weird to me, and the front is too long, but its the closest thing to a 3-box just a car that exists (at least outside of developing markets).
The problem with the 3-box car is that it lacks an immediately apparent purpose. A rakish sports car is instantly recognizable for it's use case. An SUV or pickup is the same. They are easy stories to tell & sell. But a 3-box coupe? It's hard to say. For most of automotive history, the 3 box car was just the default car - totally ubiquitous. Some were special, most were not. There's nothing inherently special about a 3-box shape. It could be basic, which is the ultimate sin of contemporary western culture. I can practically feel the status anxiety of Americans caught driving a basic car. No you can't have that. Even if its worse than basic, a compact crossover suv with insanely gratuitous styling isn't basic, it's niche! You basically can't build a "basic" car anymore - everything has to be specialized into oblivion in a relentless quest to find or create an uncompetitive market niche. Like Mazda can't build just a compact car to compete against the Toyota Corolla...it has to build a premium, but not so premium that it competes with the German premium compact cars, compact car to find an apparent market segment without competition. Of course this is all marketing semantics - the products don't have near as much distinction as we're led to believe - we know full well that the Mazda3 and Toyota Corolla are direct competitors, but every exec. in the industry wants every product to be a purple cow.
edit: Another word I thought of that I find attractive about a lot of the sporty 3-box cars of the past is they are unassuming. I'm almost certain that the AE86 Corolla became a legend because of it's unassuming character. The entire premise of initial D was that it was an unassuming kid driving an unassuming car (which is noted by many other characters) but actually being extraordinary*. It's just an ordinary compact car with a special engine and it happened to be rwd...not because it was designed from the ground up to be a sports car, but because it was a relic. I mean, those cars had solid rear axles! This basic premise of the unremarkable turned special basically built the entire sports compact car movement. Automakers ruined it by trying to make everything look special.
(*at the risk of getting into a super wide tangent, I notice this is a recurring theme in a lot of YA-fiction. Unremarkable young/youngish person in an unremarkable situation finding themselves actually in the center of a quite remarkable world in which they too, actually, are quite remarkable! - Think Initial D, Harry Potter, Twighlight, and even into like 50 shades of gray and stuff)
The problem with the 3-box car is that it lacks an immediately apparent purpose. A rakish sports car is instantly recognizable for it's use case. An SUV or pickup is the same. They are easy stories to tell & sell. But a 3-box coupe? It's hard to say. For most of automotive history, the 3 box car was just the default car - totally ubiquitous. Some were special, most were not. There's nothing inherently special about a 3-box shape. It could be basic, which is the ultimate sin of contemporary western culture. I can practically feel the status anxiety of Americans caught driving a basic car. No you can't have that. Even if its worse than basic, a compact crossover suv with insanely gratuitous styling isn't basic, it's niche! You basically can't build a "basic" car anymore - everything has to be specialized into oblivion in a relentless quest to find or create an uncompetitive market niche. Like Mazda can't build just a compact car to compete against the Toyota Corolla...it has to build a premium, but not so premium that it competes with the German premium compact cars, compact car to find an apparent market segment without competition. Of course this is all marketing semantics - the products don't have near as much distinction as we're led to believe - we know full well that the Mazda3 and Toyota Corolla are direct competitors, but every exec. in the industry wants every product to be a purple cow.
edit: Another word I thought of that I find attractive about a lot of the sporty 3-box cars of the past is they are unassuming. I'm almost certain that the AE86 Corolla became a legend because of it's unassuming character. The entire premise of initial D was that it was an unassuming kid driving an unassuming car (which is noted by many other characters) but actually being extraordinary*. It's just an ordinary compact car with a special engine and it happened to be rwd...not because it was designed from the ground up to be a sports car, but because it was a relic. I mean, those cars had solid rear axles! This basic premise of the unremarkable turned special basically built the entire sports compact car movement. Automakers ruined it by trying to make everything look special.
(*at the risk of getting into a super wide tangent, I notice this is a recurring theme in a lot of YA-fiction. Unremarkable young/youngish person in an unremarkable situation finding themselves actually in the center of a quite remarkable world in which they too, actually, are quite remarkable! - Think Initial D, Harry Potter, Twighlight, and even into like 50 shades of gray and stuff)
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At that, my '86 Jetta GL 2-door, kept all its practicality like my '88 GLi 16V. It was about preference/options back then. No sacrifice to rear legroom and trunk space. Jetta is a FWD package done right( add 1st-gen Legend Coupe and Toyota Solara as well).
I think that's the take away with a drive axle in the rear. Limits the interior space that can be created. Maybe Audi packaged the Coupe GT well, but the fwd Audi GT(and ironically, the Ur-Quattro) was better with rear leg room(but that trunk opening was ridiculous, despite it looking like a hatchback).
As mentioned above, the 1-series & 2-series coupes are probably the last of the proper 3-box coupes. The 2002 and E21 rear seat seats weren't too bad(I'll also add a fox-body Mustang).
As evidenced by Mustang sales, people, a small amount of people, will still buy a coupe. The AE86 and previous Corolla coupes, didn't have much rear room either.
Guess this is where the Yaris, Mazda2, Polo, and all the other 3-door hatches that were discontinued. For all their practicality, people still want to extra rear doors, just in case.
Anyway, glad the GR86 is choice.
I think that's the take away with a drive axle in the rear. Limits the interior space that can be created. Maybe Audi packaged the Coupe GT well, but the fwd Audi GT(and ironically, the Ur-Quattro) was better with rear leg room(but that trunk opening was ridiculous, despite it looking like a hatchback).
As mentioned above, the 1-series & 2-series coupes are probably the last of the proper 3-box coupes. The 2002 and E21 rear seat seats weren't too bad(I'll also add a fox-body Mustang).
As evidenced by Mustang sales, people, a small amount of people, will still buy a coupe. The AE86 and previous Corolla coupes, didn't have much rear room either.
Guess this is where the Yaris, Mazda2, Polo, and all the other 3-door hatches that were discontinued. For all their practicality, people still want to extra rear doors, just in case.
Anyway, glad the GR86 is choice.
That's been my feeling on the car since the first iteration. I still think it looks like it's supposed to be a liftback, so make it one -- making it more practical and useful. Rigidity is a weak excuse for not doing that, IMHO.
Manufacturers are making terrible liftbacks out of crossovers/SUVs (Crosstour, X6) and poor innocent wagons (5GT) these days, so why can't we have a nice modern three-door 86?
Part of it must simply have to do with maximizing aerodynamics, for fuel efficiency, because of the costly legislated penalties; same subject as the complaint in my last post. The demise of manual transmissions in this country is being accelerated for the same reason -- it's not good enough to have a loyal minority of manual buyers anymore. Manufacturers are stuck trying to please their customers without paying too much through the nose to do it.
The EPA rating for the new manual Toyobaru = ouch. It's a testament to how much they care that they're still going through with it anyway.
I see it as a sedan for people who don't need rear doors. Same kind of trunk, same kind of visibility, and you don't have to step around an additional door or make sure it's unlocked to retrieve something from the back while getting in or out. It's similar to the practicality of a smaller car that isn't larger than necessary, without the car being smaller.
I miss that character of my E30.
Keef
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I'm sort of embarrassed that I forgot about the 2-series because the F22/F87 M2 is obviously a fantastic car, the spiritual successor of the M3, and the ideal BMW. The new one is atrocious - because they extended the front it now has fastback wheelbase proportions combined with a 3-box greenhouse - but at least it exists I guess. I mean get this, you've got the new 2 and the current 8 coming from the same company, both of them coupes, but one looks like an El Camino driving backwards and the other looks like a torpedo pool toy.The Camaro & Challenger don't quite hit the 3-box coupe thing for me. The Camaro is a tad too rakish & squinty (the previous model was a bit better in this regard, but way too fat) and the Challenger is a Land Yacht. Both of them are also so self-referential that they can't pull off the ubiquity part that I find charming about 3-box shapes. The only one I can think of is the BMW 2 series and it only survives because it's a niche unto itself. The latest one looks pretty weird to me, and the front is too long, but its the closest thing to a 3-box just a car that exists (at least outside of developing markets).
The problem with the 3-box car is that it lacks an immediately apparent purpose. A rakish sports car is instantly recognizable for it's use case. An SUV or pickup is the same. They are easy stories to tell & sell. But a 3-box coupe? It's hard to say. For most of automotive history, the 3 box car was just the default car - totally ubiquitous. Some were special, most were not. There's nothing inherently special about a 3-box shape. It could be basic, which is the ultimate sin of contemporary western culture. I can practically feel the status anxiety of Americans caught driving a basic car. No you can't have that. Even if its worse than basic, a compact crossover suv with insanely gratuitous styling isn't basic, it's niche! You basically can't build a "basic" car anymore - everything has to be specialized into oblivion in a relentless quest to find or create an uncompetitive market niche. Like Mazda can't build just a compact car to compete against the Toyota Corolla...it has to build a premium, but not so premium that it competes with the German premium compact cars, compact car to find an apparent market segment without competition. Of course this is all marketing semantics - the products don't have near as much distinction as we're led to believe - we know full well that the Mazda3 and Toyota Corolla are direct competitors, but every exec. in the industry wants every product to be a purple cow.
edit: Another word I thought of that I find attractive about a lot of the sporty 3-box cars of the past is they are unassuming. I'm almost certain that the AE86 Corolla became a legend because of it's unassuming character. The entire premise of initial D was that it was an unassuming kid driving an unassuming car (which is noted by many other characters) but actually being extraordinary*. It's just an ordinary compact car with a special engine and it happened to be rwd...not because it was designed from the ground up to be a sports car, but because it was a relic. I mean, those cars had solid rear axles! This basic premise of the unremarkable turned special basically built the entire sports compact car movement. Automakers ruined it by trying to make everything look special.
(*at the risk of getting into a super wide tangent, I notice this is a recurring theme in a lot of YA-fiction. Unremarkable young/youngish person in an unremarkable situation finding themselves actually in the center of a quite remarkable world in which they too, actually, are quite remarkable! - Think Initial D, Harry Potter, Twighlight, and even into like 50 shades of gray and stuff)
I do agree with basically everything you said. Even down to the movie plots, all of which suggest that we should strive to be remarkable - none of us are of course, but we need to at least look remarkable, thus a Rav4 TRD or an art gallery Mazda 3. Even the Corolla is pissed off these days. We'll see if "bland" still sells by how well the new Civic does...or maybe cars have gotten so pretentious that Honda is simply exploiting a pretentiously unpretentious market gap.
I could really use that IDx right now.
I've never actually owned one of these coupes and honestly I've been very critical of sedan-based coupes for most of my life. I literally just said above that I want something like an IDx - a modern E30 slash affordable F87 - despite having a hatred of rear seats in a sports car. I would always say "it's not a real sports car" and I'm not prepared to give that up. I mean come on, I daily drove an FC RX7 for eight years and it was perfectly useful - a fastback with a hatch, massive cargo space, and extremely sporty styling and capabilities. I don't see what's so difficult about building that. The Z family has pulled it off just fine so why can't anything else? If they want to make a sports car then make a sports car damn it. If they want to make a practical coupe then make a practical coupe.
I'm going to have to revisit my thoughts on this because I want that IDx, and I definitely do not want a GR86, and I think that's all centered around the authenticity of a car's identity. The pretentiousness of the market that @Eunos_Cosmo mentioned is getting exhausting and I could really go for a regular ass sporty car that cuts through the nonsense.
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I don't want to drag this too far out, but I think part of the problem...maybe the whole problem... is the accelerating specialization in the automotive industry. This goes for all disciplines involved, but I think it is especially pronounced in automotive design. Automotive design school is a relatively new thing, and I would guess (particularly after watching certain youtube "experts") that, like architecture, the automotive design world is highly internal and...incestuous. If it's anything like my design school experience, the same people who establish the trends are the ones who teach the trends and reinforce the feedback loop - it's a frustratingly circular process that mostly serves to feed the egos of the deans and directors. It's hegemonic domination. If you go back far enough, when automotive design was still in it's grunge phase...nobody had really professionalized it. Tom Tjaarda (the designer of the Detomaso Pantera) graduated from architecture school (university of Michigan). Marcello Gandini designed the Miura when he was in his late 20s with basically no prior experience. Malcom Sayer was an aircraft engineer before designing the Jaguar E Type. And what do we have now? Self referential crap or endless design school thesis projects with the same surface moves in all the same places. Even just looking at portfolios of design school graduates its apparent they have pretty homogenized direction and work. It's just boring. Maybe the Koreans will save us because they are the only ones doing anything remotely interesting.
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Aussie pricing
www.drive.com.au
Add $3800 for the auto
2022 Subaru BRZ price and specs: $38,990 for new sports coupe
Subaru's second-generation sports coupe will arrive early next year, priced from $38,990 before on-road costs with a manual transmission – around $3700 more than before.
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To be fair the super sloping impractical coupe basically is the two door version of almost every sedan since the Fusion/Mondeo ruined the market.
That still doesn't mean BMW needed to strip every recognizable BMW element from the two door 3 series until it was a glorified Accord coupe even before they dumped the Veilside kit on the front, but it's on point for most of the other manufacturers.
That still doesn't mean BMW needed to strip every recognizable BMW element from the two door 3 series until it was a glorified Accord coupe even before they dumped the Veilside kit on the front, but it's on point for most of the other manufacturers.
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Mount Panorama debut set for Toyota GR86
Toyota’s next-gen GR86 affordable sports coupe ready for unveiling at Bathurst 1000
www.goauto.com.au
