[gymratter]

I wanted to get this thread up before I forget a lot of what the Toyota rep, Dave, told us last night at dinner.

First, I'll do my best to recap his credibility. This guy was involved with product development of the 200 Series Land Cruiser about 10 years ago. He worked with the Toyota engineers in Japan and in many other countries on various continents, testing every aspect of the 200.

Interestingly, he also is involved with product development for just about every other North American market Toyota as well, so he had some interesting insight into Toyota product planning, development, and execution.

This guy was great - the real deal - and he patiently answered a LOT of our questions. Here's some of the info we gathered from him:

Skipped a bunch of blah blah blah...

- Any info on the upcoming Toyota Supra?
-- Release date early 2019; should have north of 400hp, expect a manual option. Dave would not comment on powertrain other than to indicate it was a joint build with BMW and it will NOT be using BMW's ubiquitous 3.0 twin turbo inline 6. He said it may have a 3.5 v6 turbo and there may be a hybrid variant.

That's most of what I recall from the conversation. An important, if not somewhat disturbing takeway, was that Toyota doesn't really build vehicles FOR the off-road enthusiast. Certainly not to the degree many of the LCDC members use their trucks. I took from Dave's conversation with us that Toyota wants their vehicles to be tough and last forever, but that actual capability is lower on the list for them. The main reason is liability (from what I gathered) - the more capable you build and market the vehicle, the more likely you are to get sued when people flip it, roll it or otherwise make poor decisions.

Dave specifically said that when they were developing the 200, they wanted to make sure the vehicle had a "normal service life" - but that it could and would have that normal service life in the harshest of environments; even environments that don't even have roads.

I hope that helps - please chime in if you were there and I missed some things!

https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/dav...e-200.1003052/[/QUOTE]