The Toyota Supra began as a stretched Celica built to rival Datsun
American Toyota dealers in the late 1970s kept losing buyers to the hugely popular Datsun 280Z, so they asked for a rival. Toyota's answer was to take its Celica liftback, lengthen the nose by about 13 centimetres and squeeze in a six-cylinder engine. The result, launched in 1978, was the first Supra, officially still a Celica.
Borrowed identity lasted for years. The first two generations wore the Celica's dragon badge because they were technically Celicas, and in Japan the car was sold as the Celica XX, pronounced double X. The Supra only became a separate model from mid-1986, with the A70, and even now the two names are often confused. The name itself comes from a Latin prefix meaning above or beyond.
Under the bonnet, the Supra looked back to Toyota's celebrated 2000GT. The first three generations used descendants of the same M-series straight-six found in the Crown and the 2000GT, and even shared its A chassis code. In Japan, buyers could pick a 2.0-litre or a 2.6-litre six, and the choice was partly about tax: the bigger engine pushed owners into a higher annual road-tax bracket, making the car dearer to keep than a regular Celica.
The redesigned car of 1982 brought pop-up headlights and a twin-cam 2.8-litre engine for North America, good for 145 horsepower and 0 to 60 mph in 9.8 seconds. American buyers chose between a Performance Type with flared wheel arches and a Luxury Type that could have a digital dashboard and trip computer estimating arrival times. In Japan, the Celica XX of that era introduced what is described as the world's first navigation computer.
The earlier generations were built at Toyota's Tahara plant and the fourth at Motomachi. Sales of that fourth car ended in the United States in 1998 and worldwide production stopped in 2002. The name returned in 2019 for a fifth generation co-developed with BMW, whose production ended in March 2026.
Source: Toyota Supra
