GT Channel SCION FR-S Chief Engineer Tetsuya Tada Interview

[ryangt]

Originally Posted by ngabdala

When is this civic type r coming to the states?

never honda killed type r last year, and we have not seen a type r since 98

[ngabdala]

Fucking Honda

[Fly Guy]

I found this, but it's a shorter video:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHVhaTNRk8E"]2013 Scion FR-S Chief Engineer Tetsuya Tada Interview - YouTube[/ame]

[ayau]

Originally Posted by Fly Guy

I found this, but it's a shorter video:

that's actually the exact video. the original video was poorly edited and had a long 4 minute blank screen. that's why it was taken down and re-uploaded.

[ayau]

i just rewatched the video and i think this was tada's reasoning behind the prius tires.

many sports cars require frequent tire changes due to a combination of low tread life and extra load being put on the tires during spirited drives. to extrapolate on this idea, purchasing tires can get relatively expensive especially on a sub 30k car. if you look at someone who buys a gtr or any expensive sports car, tire prices are often not an issue for them. however, someone who buys a brz/frs will have to think twice before spending $700-1000 on a new set of tires.

tada wanted to make this car affordable to the masses, and that included purchasing replacement tires. many sports cars are designed around a specific OEM tire in order to achieve its desired performance characteristics (cornering, accelerating, etc). when it's time for consumers to purchase new tires, often times the car's original performance characteristics are degraded because the car was originally designed to use the specific OEM tire. generally speaking, OEM tires are more expensive than non-OEM tires.

tada's solution was to focus the design on the chassis/suspension instead of relying too much on the specific tire. this lead to tada picking the most balanced tire which happened to be the same tires used on priuses. tada's idea was pretty straightforward; if you can achieve great performance on standard tires, then the car's performance cannot be worse when you buy aftermarket tires.

as tada mentioned, many car manufacturers design/tune their cars with a specific OEM tire. off the top of my head, the GTR and the S2000 CR followed that design philosophy.

i'm going to go on a limb here and say that the idea of putting prius tires to make drifting easier was not tada's original intention.

i also want to point out to the doubters that think subaru/toyota chose the prius to cut costs. tada mentioned in the video that these tires prius tires aren't cheap. they cost $856 at tirerack.com. that's $300 more than the much more aggressive summer performance tires dunlop star specs.

http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5437