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Toyota Planning Hybrid Sports Car

June 22, 2006 on 1:43 am | In Car News |

Toyota is aiming to revive its sports car line-up, the Dow Jones Newswires reported, citing Toyota executives in Japan and Europe.

“The sports car will come, but I don’t know exactly when. Since we stopped production of the Celica and the MR2, there’s a gap in that end of our range where we don’t get the full impact of our participation in Formula 1,” said Masahide Yasuda, president of Toyota France.

One new model is “going to be global project, not one aimed at one region more than another. The concept is a hybrid,” said Tokuo Fukuichi, the head of Toyota’s ED2 design center in southern France.

“We made a proposal to the head office for a hybrid sports car. We’re not sure that we’re going to proceed with that, but every time we develop a new car we consider a hybrid system. We have limited resources,” Fukuichi said.