Today’s unveilings at the Tokyo motor show show that Toyota and Honda are taking vastly different approaches to sports cars.
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On the one hand, Toyota revealed the two seat Lexus LFA supercar with 4.8-litre V10 engine, 325km/h per hour (200 miles per hour) and go from zero to 100 kilometres kph (60 mph) in 3.7 seconds. Production will be limited to 500 over a two-year period starting in December 2010.
It’s a car that flies in the face of the automaker’s image as a pioneer of greener vehicles but one that Toyota’s new president, Akio Toyoda, has said is crucial for cars to remain a product that consumers can get excited about as motorisation spreads to more corners of the world, Reuters reported.
“It’s our mission as automakers to offer cars that possess the ‘fun’ spirit that should be at the base of any car,” Toyoda told the news agency at the unveiling, noting he had been involved in the LFA’s development from its early stages.
But Honda chief Takanobu Ito told the news agency the future is about clean, sustainable cars, and sports cars were no exception.
“Sure, there are folks who like that ‘vroom’ of the engine out of nostalgia,” Ito told Reuters earlier this month. “But those people are stuck in the past.”
Honda last year ditched plans to replace the NSX sportscar, citing an urgent need to save money amid the economic downturn and the growing consumer shift towards greener cars.
“The era of V10 engines is gone,” said Ito, who betrayed no sense of regret over the canned project despite having designed the ground-breaking all-aluminium body for the NSX in 1990.
He reckons a sports car for the next generation could be a zero-emission fuel-cell car like the automaker’s FCX Clarity, currently on lease in limited numbers in the United States and Japan.
Although Honda has never billed the sleek, hydrogen-powered sedan as a sports car, Ito told Reuters it had all the characteristics to qualify.
“It’s light because it’s not weighed down by a tonne of batteries,” he said in a jab at the battery-powered electric sports machines built by US start-up Tesla Motors.
“When you weigh a car down like that, it undermines the characteristics of a sports car.
“But if you have a light car like the FCX Clarity that’s powered by a motor, you get maximum torque from a zero start and acceleration is incredible. In a way, that’s a sports car.”
