A New Toyota MR2 Is Official—Yet Somehow Still Further Away Than Ever

Talk of a revived Toyota MR2 has been building steadily—while the car didn’t materialize at this year’s Tokyo Auto Salon as some predicted, it hasn’t been shelved.

In a recent interview with Automotive News, Gazoo Racing president Tomoya Takahashi confirmed that a new MR2 remains in development, even if its debut stil won't happen for time.

According to Takahashi, the project sits in the earliest phase of Toyota’s internal development process. He described it as the first of four stages that lead to mass production—it typically takes four to five years to complete the entire path to production. That suggests the MR2 is unlikely to appear toward the end of this decade, stamping out expectations that the car was close to being production-ready.

Momentum around the MR2 concept increased last year when Toyota revealed the GR Yaris M, a mid-engine prototype that stuffed a new 400-horsepower, turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder—known internally as the G20E—behind the front seats of the rally-bred hatchback.

Toyota has since put the GR Yaris M into competition, using it as a rolling test bed for packaging, cooling, and durability lessons that are expected to inform the next MR2. Takahashi said the demanding layout of the Yaris project was intentional, as solving those challenges in a small platform makes the engine easier to adapt elsewhere. Clever guy.

Despite earlier speculation—including the FT-Se concept from Toyota—that the MR2 would return as an electric vehicle, Takahashi was clear about Toyota’s commitment to internal-combustion engines.

The G20E is designed to be flexible, capable of front-, mid-, or rear-engine placement, and able to run either longitudinally or transversely, which means we're probably going to see the engine under the hood of all kinds of fun stuff, as well as some mainstreet product as well. Toyota expects it to outperform the company’s current turbocharged 2.4-liter engine while being more compact in overall size and height.

The engine has been engineered to meet forthcoming Euro 7 emissions standards without relying on electrification, but hybrid assistance remains on the table—as we've already seen with the new GR GT. Takahashi said that if the G20E is to serve multiple vehicles across Toyota’s lineup, some form of hybrid compatibility is most likely. That leaves the door open for an electrified MR2 variant—kind of like a mini C8 Corvette E-Ray, or ZR1X.

"If we are going to mount this engine on many different vehicles, it’s almost mandatory to be able to combine it with hybrid technology," he said.

While Toyota has not confirmed details about the MR2’s final shape or size, Takahashi hinted it will be larger than the GR Yaris M prototype. The engineering team has, so far, been more concenred with getting the powertrain and layout right rather than locking down sheet metal shapes. For now, the MR2 remains a work in progress.

OUR TAKE: Logical, it's unlikely Toyota will be able to offer the GR86, Celica, MR2, GR Corolla, and GR Yaris for sale at the same time, there's just to much overlap of similar products competing for a limited pool of consumer dollars.

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