[QUOTE=blu_;162921]
Quote:
Originally Posted by A Gomez
As I understand it, the idea of the car was discussed and then scrapped. Then Subaru came to Toyota with their first Legacy based prototype they built and Toyota jumped on board. The project makes a lot of sense for Subaru and I think they were very excited to do it. The DI technology alone was a deal maker for them business wise. Not to mention that this is basically a stepping stone to the next wrx/sti platform.
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Could not be further off.
There is an article where Tetsuya Tada explains a bit how the car came to be. Originally, it was simply to create a sports car. What kind though? Eventually they rested on an entry-level, pure bones style compact RWD sports car, akin to the AE86 (which Tada-san was apart of back in the 80's). Afterwards Toyota began its research, including having Moto-P, the webmaster of Club4ag.com, basically THE AE86 enthusiast site for the U.S.A (as well as other sports Toyota's, but mainly the first gen MR-2 and AE86) come to Japan to discuss what enthusiasts would want out of a car that was spiritually influenced by the AE86. This was in 2006 I believe...I remember Moto creating a thread on the site about the whole deal. Every AE86 enthusiast was just going insane over it.
It wasn't til much later that we found out that Subaru was in on the game too, and the car would be coming with a boxer engine and jointly manufactured. Before that, speculation was abound on what type of 4cyl would be put in; 1.5L, a 2ZZ successor, etc.
I have literally been watching this car since the early rumor-mills of 2006. If memory serves, Subaru wasn't even in the discussion til....shit, 2009 when the FT-86 was shown? Hard to remember now, lol.