Last week Toyota unveiled Toyota unveiled the GR sports car series in Japan and at the time it wasn’t known if any of the performance models would be sold in the United States. Now it’s being reported that Toyota will use its existing TRD brand in the U.S. to sell its new performance-oriented models.
According to Automotive News, Toyota’s executives want to sell the new performance models under the existing TRD brand, since that’s already established here. Toyota’s U.S. execs may also not like the Gazoo name, since it brings up images of the Great Gazoo, a green alien that stared in The Flintstones TV series in the 1960s.
We still don’t know exactly what the United States will get from the GR sub-brand, but the same performance treatment that the GR models received will be applied to the upcoming TRD models in the U.S.
“We are taking the challenge of adopting new tastes created in this process to stock cars as much as possible,” Shigeki Tomoyama, president of Gazoo Racing Co. recently stated. “In its next phase, we will get a designated sports car platform and eventually — finally — we want to introduce a pure, genuine sports car, which can compete against top-class world competitors.”
With the arrival of new performance oriented Toyotas, all eyes are on the upcoming return of the Toyota Supra, which may debut next month at the 2017 Tokyo Motor Show.
Source: Automotive News
