THE AE86 LEGEND
Ironically, as the final Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno coupes were fading away, their AE86 predecessors were becoming more popular than ever. The AE86’s racing and tōge career did not end when the rear-drive Levin and Trueno went out of production and, starting in 1995, those exploits were further glamorized by Shuichi Shigeno’s manga series Initial D, whose young protagonist drove a white-over-black three-door AE86 Sprinter Trueno. The manga later spawned a popular anime series, which served to introduce the AE86 to a new generation of fans who weren’t old enough to drive (or weren’t born) when the cars were originally on sale. Drifting, meanwhile, eventually inspired an American feature film, 2006’s Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, which included a cameo by Keiichi Tsuchiya.
Two-tone paint was standard on AE86 GT APEX cars and optional on other models. White-over-black paint jobs have become very popular for these cars thanks to Initial D, whose protagonist’s Sprinter Trueno wore that color combination. (Photo: “Toyota Corolla GT AE86 Trueno hatchback” © 2012 ThijsDeschildre; resized 2014 by Aaron Severson and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)
Some Toyota engineers and executives hadn’t forgotten about the AE86 either, despite Toyota’s comparative dearth of sporty models in the first decade of the new century. After Toyota signed an agreement with Fuji Heavy Industries (parent company of Subaru) to jointly develop a new sports coupe, the AE86 became one of the points of reference for that project, which was intended as a lightweight, straightforward, eminently driftable rear-drive coupe. Toyota and Subaru even hired Tsuchiya as a consultant on the development of that car, which new Toyota president Akio Toyoda decided in 2009 would be called “Toyota 86” in honor of its AE86 forebears.
As worthy as the modern 86/GT86/FR-S is — and if we were in the market, we would be tempted — we think its connection with the AE86 is rather tenuous. With its 1,998 cc (122 cu. in.) engine, bespoke chassis, and independent rear suspension, the 86 seems closer to the original Toyota 2000GT or the last rear-drive RA63 Celica 2000GT than the live-axle Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno. The AE85 and AE86 were never intended as pure, purpose-built rear-drive sports coupes; their existence was first and foremost a matter of production and accounting expedience, much like making dinner out of one or two new ingredients and an assortment of leftovers in order to put off really going grocery shopping.
The Toyota 86 is sold as the GT86 in Europe and the Scion FR-S in the U.S., but even the Scion version proudly wears “86” emblems on its front fenders. The similar Subaru BRZ version, of course, does not. (Photo: “Toyota 86 GT – Logo 2” © 2012 Cllackr; dedicated to the public domain by the photographer under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, resized 2014 by Aaron Severson)
As with the Fox-body Ford Mustang, another cheap, lightweight RWD car with a cult following and vast tuning potential, the appeal of the rear-drive Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno was not so much that they were brilliant cars right out of the box (although they did very well in showroom stock competition), but that they constituted a solid, affordable foundation for any number of automotive impulses. Much of the reason for that was that at the end of the day, the Levin and Trueno were still Corollas at heart: cheap to buy, straightforward to maintain, and inexpensive to run.
Beyond that, they stand today as relics of an earlier automotive age. Today, conventional sedans and coupes without a prestigious European badge are becoming a tough sell in many parts of the world, superseded by an assortment of more specialized models. The Levin and Trueno recall an era before the reign of the specialty car, when achieving mass-market success still meant that each automotive line, however humble, had to offer a little something for everyone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Frank Dupre, Ingvar Hallström, John Howell, and ‘oversteerer’ for their assistance with background and images for this article.
NOTES ON SOURCES
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August 1984: 40–44; “Why is Toyota successful? (The Toyota Production System),” Toyoland, n.d., www.toyoland. com/ toyota/ production-system.html, accessed 17 January 2014; James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2007); and Jack Yamaguchi, “Toyota Corolla dons a new kimono,” Road & Track Vol. 46, No. 12 (August 1995): 49–50.
The online dictionary Jisho (jisho.org) was also a big help in deciphering Japanese-language information.
Some historical exchange rate data for the dollar and the yen came from Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates Between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies” (2011, MeasuringWorth, https://www.measuringworth.org/exchangeglobal/, used with permission). Exchange rate values cited in the text represent the approximate dollar equivalent of prices in non-U.S. currencies, not contemporary U.S. suggested retail prices, which are cited separately. Please note that all equivalencies cited herein are approximate and are provided solely for the reader’s general reference — this is an automotive history, not a treatise on currency trading or the value of money, and nothing in this article should be taken as financial advice of any kind!
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Wow! What a great and detailed history you have written. Thanks.
This was truly well worth the wait! Very comprehensive article – the AE101 Levin and Trueno shared a dashboard with a 4 door hardtop called either the Sprinter Marino or the Corolla Ceres, some of which also carried the 20V engine. A friend of mine ran a few of these cars, and the early manual ones definitely needed a 6-speed gearbox – you also had to be a skilled driver to rein in some of the torque steer. The boy racers graduated from the Suzuki Swift GTi to these in the late 1990s when they became available as foreign used cars in the Barbados market. There are still a lot of them around in varying stages of tune – it’s become increasingly difficult to find one that’s completely standard.
Thanks, Dave. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Levin and Trueno dash was the same as the Ceres/Marino, but I looked it up and you’re quite right.
I don’t think a lot of my U.S. or European readers will probably have heard of the Ceres and Marino, so I added a photo. Four-door “hardtops” like these were very popular in Japan for a number of years, going back to the late seventies. Most were not actually pillarless hardtops in the traditional sense, but they approximated that look by concealing the B-pillars (designing them to be thin in profile, painting them black, and putting them behind the door windows rather than between them), using frameless door glass, and sometimes adopting a more coupe-like roofline. A couple of examples with which readers may be more familiar include the ’90s Integra four-doors, the Lexus ES250 (which I believe was based on the JDM Camry Prominent hardtop), and the last U.S.-market Mazda 929.
The Corolla Ceres and Sprinter Marino were offered in three grades (F Type, X Type, and G Type) that approximated the AE100/AE101 Levin/Trueno S, SJ, and GT grades in engines and equipment. There wasn’t an equivalent to the GT APEX or GT-Z, so as far as I know you couldn’t get a Ceres or Marino with Super Strut or the 4A-GZE engine, but as you mention, the G Type did have four-wheel discs and the 4A-GE TWINCAM20 engine. You could also order a sports package that included the coupes’ spoilers and other cosmetic bits, so a properly equipped Ceres G looked and performed a lot like an AE101 Levin GT.
It looks to me that the Super Strut suspension worked by simply divorcing the strut from the steering, as with Ford’s RevoKnuckle on the Focus ST and GM’s HiPer strut on the Regal GS/Insignia and that the extra lower arms allow better steering geometry and reduced offset, a la BMW’s double pivot and the lower-half of Audi’s four link design. It probably also induces camber gain, as you speculate.
You’re right — I hadn’t previously looked closely at the layouts of the RevoKnuckle or HiPerStrut (or whatever Renault calls theirs), but the basic principles look to be very similar, just executed a little differently in each case.
I’ve been studying these systems more closely and Super Strut was actually somewhat more complex than the current HiPer Strut, RevoKnuckle, and PerfoHub. The newer setups have the relocated steering axis and reduced spindle height, but Toyota also did something very complex with the way the strut extension is pivoted to the rear lower arm to allow more camber gain. The GM, Ford, and Renault setups give a little more camber gain, but looking at the way they’re set up, I’m reasonably confident that it’s not as much as Super Strut provided. The tradeoff is that they’re also not as complex or as expensive and will hopefully be more reliable.
Love this site! I love the Levins from start to finish. I own an AE111 Levin with the 20 valve blacktop and man isn’t it fun to drive!
A great article.
Several of the AE86 Levins that competed in the Australian Touring Car Championship in the mid to late 80’s are now racing in historic touring car racing – they are great little cars!
My mostly stock 4A-C powered USDM AE86 with the manual transmission (slightly modified intake/vaccum setup and rear muffler delete ,keeping catalytic converter) has hit GPS Verified 101mph on flat ground, I’m sure if it was a little fresher (mine has 230k miles) it might hit 105. That’s getting close to 5,000rpm in 5th which is right when peak power starts to fall off, so anything beyond that would be stretching it.
Thanks, I enjoyed the article… I’ve had my AE86 Trueno for 23 years now… Handling in stock form was pretty scary. Not sure how they got the factory JDM model to 2090lbs. Mine fully stripped for racing with no interior and sweating every gram is still 2030lbs.
I’m a little puzzled by the JDM curb weights myself; I’m not sure what Japanese vehicle regulations require in terms of fuel and fluids in those calculations, but the quoted figures seem consistently lower than what I’d expect from a fully equipped and fueled car. (That’s a frequent issue with manufacturer curb weights regardless of country of origin.) Unfortunately, there’s not much to be done about it short of putting the car on a scale or finding some reasonably neutral third party who has. For that reason, I tend to find factory weight figures of most use for comparison purposes — for instance, the weight difference between trim levels.
On the subject of the Toyota A engine, aside from Toyota reputedly drawing inspiration from the Cosworth BSA (some go as far as to say it is a reliable copy), does any relation exist between the Toyota A and Daihatsu C-Series engines?
Preexisting ties between Toyota and Daihatsu notwithstanding, it is difficult to ignore the fact both engines appeared roughly at the same time in 1977-1978, feature cast-iron blocks with alloy-heads and belt-drives, the 1-litre Daihatsu CB and 1.3-litre Toyota 2A virtually share the same 76mm bore with Daihatsu even making use of Toyota’s lean-burn design system.
I’m not familiar with the Daihatsu engine, but Toyota owned a big chunk of Daihatsu by then, so it’s not unlikely. It should be noted that the lean-burn system Toyota used in the late seventies (in the JDM 12T engine and others) was actually a Honda design used under license, so while that in no way contradicts your theory, it’s not probative either. Also, as I understand it, the early Toyota A-system engines (of which I think the first was the 1.5-liter 1A in the late seventies Tercel) ended up being somewhat troublesome and requiring some further design changes (details of which I do not know) to yield the later 3A and 4A engines of the eighties, so if the Daihatsu CB is related, I don’t know where it falls in that development sequence.
As for the Cosworth comparisons, I’m leery of those. That engineers at Toyota (and/or Yamaha) were familiar with the Cosworth twin-cam engines is not unlikely, but Cosworth did not invent belt-driven OHCs (as discussed in the Pontiac OHC six article), and a great many of Toyota’s seventies engines were SOHC or DOHC with aluminum heads on iron blocks, so there was a lot of prior Toyota experience in many of those areas. Likewise at Yamaha, which had designed the heads for many of Toyota’s DOHC engines; Toyota’s official information on the 4A-GE is somewhat vague about Yamaha’s involvement with that engine, but Yamaha had done the heads for the 2T-GE, 18R-GE, and the later 1G-GE six, inter alia.
I’ve noticed that British sources tend to be particularly insistent that any Japanese invention or design of any merit must necessarily be a copy of some (implicitly superior) prior British or European design, which I find frustrating, to say the least. It isn’t a strictly yea-or-nay question, since of course some Japanese automakers of the fifties and early sixties did use British technology, and at times hired European designers or consultants, but Toyota, in particular, was and is an enormous company which by the seventies had tremendous depth of engineering and manufacturing resources. While they were by no means adverse to licensing outside technology — the aforementioned Honda lean-burn system for one, Bosch D-Jetronic and L-Jetronic electronic injection for another — doing so was a matter of expedience rather than competency. So, I tend to take the instance that “the 2T-G was a copy of the Lotus Twin-Cam” or “the 4A-GE was a copy of the Cosworth BDA” with a grain of salt.
If I were an engineer, I might be able to provide a more detailed comparison between the Cosworth and Toyota engines in combustion chamber design and so forth. Lacking that skill, I will say instead that the development brief for the A-system engine was to replace the existing K- and T-system engines with an engine family better-suited to eighties emissions standards, which by 1980 were as strict in Japan as in the U.S. There were twin-cam performance versions of the A-system, but on a numerical basis, its primary applications were in mildly tuned, frequently carbureted SOHC form, for which the high-strung Cosworth was probably not the most useful of models.
The Daihatsu C-Series is largely associated with the Daihatsu Charade including potent 1-litre turbocharged engines from the 68 hp Charade Turbo and 101+ hp Charade GTti.
Given the ties it is difficult to imagine Daihatsu going with a completely clean-sheet design for the Charade as both the car and engine appeared in late-1977, followed in 1978 by the Toyota A powered Toyota Tercel.
It’s possible; as I said, I don’t know. FWIW, the 1987 Jikayousha buyer’s guide I have identifies the four-cylinder engines in the (later-generation) Charade as the 2A-U and 3A-U, which are Toyota engine codes (1.3 and 1.5-liters respectively) and presumably just Toyota engines.
Belt driven DOHC engines were built concurrently by Fiat/Lancia, Cosworth, and apparently by several Japanese companies. I don’t doubt for a minute that I have missed many other makers from other countries who also utilised belt drive for DOHC engines.
Who built the first one, and the first offered in mainstream cars I have no idea.
But I think it was convergent evolution that brought them about. It was no secret that DOHC was a tremendous help in building an efficient engine. The problem designers and engineers faced was reliability and cost for production engines. The appearance of toothed belts was a useful tool in addressing both concerns.
It seems technology has now caught up with the problems enclosed chains had, more cars are appearing with chain driven valve gear, improvements in lubrication and probably the metals used mean that the timing chain on a well maintained modern engine will probably last the life of the car.
Roger.
The Pontiac OHC 6 article talks at some length about the history of belt-driven OHC engines, of which Glas was the first series production manufacturer. Pontiac did a great deal of work on developing timing belts suitable for more powerful engines, culminating in the 1966–69 Pontiac 215/230 cu. in. SOHC six and a variety of experimental V-8 engines. The belt was quieter than a chain or gears as well as being cheaper, which added to its appeal.
The eventual limitation, of course, is that with transverse engine/FWD layouts, or even longitudinal RWD ones where the engine bay is cluttered with plumbing and accessories, changing the belt is a bear of a job, and with some valvegear layouts, a broken or slipping belt can mean serious engine damage. As expectations have increased regarding what “the life of the car” ought to mean, that’s become harder to accept, to the point that even Honda (long a proponent of belt-driven cams) has switched to chains in the past decade or so.