Controlled Information Leaks
 

To keep interest high on the new RWD Toyota, Toyota is excercising a controlled leak of official information. The Japanese magazines are privy to these- so read and monitor the various websites.

The car is at least 2 years away.

2 years :( That's a long wait.

But hopefully after the concept is shown at the Tokyo Motor Show, Toyota will keep our appetites whet with regular information on the production version. But yea, 2011 seems so far away.

Nice, any particular magazines we should pay attention to?

That's not really news, IMHO. Seems like cars like this always have planned official news leaks to keep people interested (i.e., GTR, 370Z, the Camaro SS, etc etc)

Regardless, it's working on me! :)

Could be sooner than that, the 2011 mustang will be rolling off the line in the spring of next year...

Then again, they said 2011 for this car, they didn't specify a model year, and toyota might not be ahead in model years like ford

Hopefully some decent amount of information is revealed during TAS '09. An approximate curb weight and some engine specs would be nice :p

2 years?! thats way too long, they gotta put priority on production of this car if their president Toyoda really means what he says and wants to bring the glory back to the company

It should be available late 2011, which means it would technically be the 2012 model year...

But who really knows, this concept has been on-and-off for so long, they've got lots of development time in already.

The early reports from '07 said we'd be driving them in the summer of '08. It appears the overal concept has changed somewhat since then, but the basics are all still in place and I'd guess that means the necessary development was done previously as well. Maybe with the weak dollar they'll step up their game and get it here sooner rather than later.

The latest concept certainly looked close to production-ready aside from the interior. I can't imagine Toyota is in the mood to be wasting money on useless concepts now that it's sales tanked like everyone else!

Keep in mind Toyota's track record:

Scion T2B - Concept released March 2005, new xB released June 2007 (little over 2 years)
Scion ccX - Concept released January 2003, tC released June 2004 (little over 1 year, and supposedly it was a record for concept to production in only 13 months)

At first glance this "concept" looked almost production ready, but when you really look hard at it, you can see it's definitely8 a one-off concept as opposed to any type of pre-production. There's also the question as to the engine, as supposedly that's one of the things that's held up development so far. So unfortunately, late 2011 could definitely be a relatively accurate guess.

The XYR Concept, which was 99% the same as the production 7th Celica, was debuted at the 1999 Toyko Motor Show; the 7th Celica was released in late 1999 - early 2000.

If they follow the same pattern for the FT-86, which looks about 95-99% production ready, it should be released by late 2011 - early 2012.

And that's pretty much what they've been claiming is the target for release.

Time flies nowadays. Look at it this way, GT4 came out in 2005 on the PS2, and that was more than 4 years ago. I think 2 years isn't so bad, especially since we can drive a virtual one in GT5 this march!

That's a good point forgot about this thing being a driveable car in GT5! I'm gonna go watch that trailer again :) I thought the game was coming out this holiday season tho:confused: