BMW-Toyota joint sports car project is on like Donkey Kong

�� · #1 31-12-2013, 01:40 AM

It's official - there will be a jointly developed sports car from BMW and Toyota. While the two auto giants signed a Memorandum of Understanding that pledged to pursue "joint development of architecture and components for a future sports vehicle" back in June of 2012, in the interim, it has remained unclear how those plans had been progressing. BMW has finally officially confirmed that the German and Japanese manufacturers will be codeveloping a pair of sports cars in addition to pursuing other disciplines including fuel cell systems and lightweight technologies.

"We have agreed on a joint architecture for a sports car. What is important is that there will be two different vehicles that are authentic to the two brands," BMW Development Chief Herbert Diess told Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reuters is reporting. This is a very, very big step for both brands, but now the speculation can officially begin as to what the products of this agreement will look like.

There's ample reason to believe that the BMW-Toyota tie up will result in a Supra successor based on comments made by the chief engineer of the GT86/FR-S program, Tatsuya Tada, back in August. Follow that with a rumor from earlier this month that Toyota could debut a Supra concept car at the upcoming Detroit Auto Show later this month, and we could be seeing the fruits of this partnership sooner rather than later.

While we can make educated guesses about what the Toyota end of this partnership will develop, the fruit from BMW's side of this joint agreement seemingly remains more of an open question. Will it be an entirely new model, or perhaps something like Z4 Coupe replacement? Have your say on the matter in Comments.

BMW-Toyota joint sports car project is on like Donkey Kong originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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