Toyota GR Supra manual 2023 long-term review

author: FutureCar Staff    

Why we're running it: To find out how much a good three-pedal gearbox can improve a modern sports car with a classic flavour.

Life with a Toyota GR Supra: Month 1

Welcoming the GR Supra to the fleet - 16 August 2023

As a motoring hack, when you pick up the phone to a manufacturer's PR representative who is responding to something you have just written, you tend to wish you had been smart enough to print out that list of ready-made reasons to urgently hang up and then pin it to your office wall.

Not this time. "I've just been reading your group test on manual sports cars," said the man from Toyota. "You forgot one, of course – and we think it's rather good. So would you like to run a GR Supra 3.0 manual long-termer for a few months?

No pre-prepared script was necessary for my reply. The Toyota GR Supra is a car that has tempted me from a distance since it first appeared in 2019. When we road tested it, I liked the idea, and the '90s-Supra-tribute styling, a little more than the driving experience. The steering felt a bit woolly and over-assisted to me, and the auto 'box a little undeserving of a truly sporty application. But, as is so like Toyota, the company has chipped away at making the car better as the years have passed – and introducing a version with three pedals and a manual gearlever is just one of the routes it has taken.

So we are to spend the next three months or so exploring them, in a GR Supra 3.0 manual with about 9000 miles and nine months already on the clock. Box fresh this car is not, but this should mean that, at some stage during our custody, it will go in for its annual oil change and tell us something about how good Toyota's dealer customer service is in 2023, and how much a £55,000 sports car costs to keep in the process. So this should be an interesting few months.

The GR Supra was launched to customers in 2019 in six-cylinder 3.0-litre automatic form but gained a cheaper, four-cylinder 2.0-litre auto version in 2021 – and then branched out again in 2022 with the model we're testing. It was Toyota's intention all along to launch a manual transmission for the car, apparently, and so committed to the idea was the company that it developed a gearbox especially for the job, from components that transmission supplier ZF had on the shelf but had never combined for anything else.

FutureCar Staff