Toyota GR Supra Finally Goes Pure No More BMW DNA

There are arguments that have followed the Toyota GR Supra since the moment it reappeared in January 2019 at the Detroit Motor Show — debates that have never fully settled regardless of how many lap records the car set, how many positive road tests it earned or how convincingly it handled on a twisting mountain road. The argument was always the same: is it really a Supra? The question was never about the car’s capability, which was broadly excellent from the day it launched. It was about identity — about whether a car sharing its chassis, its inline-six engine, its electronic architecture and its Austrian production facility with the BMW Z4 could genuinely claim the lineage of the A80 generation Supra that became one of the defining sports cars of the 1990s and one of the most culturally significant Japanese performance cars of all time.

Gallery: Toyota GR Supra

That argument is now, definitively, over. Toyota confirmed in late 2025 that production of the A90 GR Supra would end in March 2026 — closing the books on the BMW collaboration and the Magna Steyr assembly line in Graz that produced both the Supra and the Z4 for seven years. And with the confirmation that Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division is developing the sixth-generation GR Supra entirely in-house, using a new Toyota platform, a Toyota-developed hybrid powertrain and Toyota-engineered suspension, electronics and body architecture, the conversation about authenticity will finally be settled on the only terms that matter: the car itself. The 2027 Toyota GR Supra Mk6 will be, in every meaningful sense, a Toyota. For the enthusiasts who spent seven years wishing it were, that is exactly what they asked for.

Why the BMW Partnership Happened — and Why It Had to End

To understand the significance of Toyota going alone with the Mk6, it is worth understanding clearly why the BMW partnership existed in the first place and why it was always going to have a defined lifespan. When Toyota’s leadership, under Akio Toyoda’s direction, decided to revive the Supra nameplate in the mid-2010s, the financial and engineering reality of producing a low-volume, dedicated rear-wheel-drive sports car on a standalone platform was prohibitive. Sports cars — even iconic ones — are expensive to develop and relatively inexpensive to sell, generating margins that rarely justify the full engineering investment their specialised architectures require. The partnership with BMW, whose Z4 roadster shared the same foundational economics problem, solved both manufacturers’ challenges simultaneously: two cars on one platform, one production facility, shared development costs and a commercially viable business case for two vehicles that might otherwise never have existed at all.

It was a pragmatic arrangement that produced a genuinely capable sports car — the A90 Supra was, by any honest objective assessment, an excellent vehicle with sharp dynamics, a sonorous straight-six engine, beautiful proportions and a level of driver engagement that earned it places on numerous annual best-of lists throughout its production run. It won the Golden Steering Wheel award from Auto Bild in 2019, won Best Handling Car from Sport Auto magazine in 2020 over competition including the McLaren 600 LT and Porsche 718 Cayman GT4, and appeared on Car and Driver’s 10Best list for 2020. These are not the achievements of a car that was merely competent or derivative. They are the achievements of a car that was genuinely excellent at what it set out to do.

But the partnership was always finite. BMW’s timeline for the Z4 concluded with production ending in early 2026, and without a committed production partner sharing the platform costs, the financial justification for continuing the A90 in its existing form evaporated. Rather than seeking a new collaboration partner or discontinuing the nameplate entirely, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division made the decision that enthusiasts had been advocating since the A90’s debut: build the next Supra themselves, on their own terms, with their own engineering.

The 2027 GR Supra Mk6: What Toyota Is Building

The sixth-generation GR Supra is expected to arrive in 2027, developed on a new Toyota platform that retains the fundamental architecture that has defined the Supra’s character across five generations — front-engined, rear-wheel drive, two-seat sports coupe. This layout was never in serious question. The Supra’s identity is inseparable from the rear-wheel-drive dynamics that have defined every generation from the original 1978 Celica Supra to the A80 that became a cultural icon in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What changes is everything beneath and around that fundamental layout.

The powertrain at the centre of the Mk6 is expected to be a Toyota-developed 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine paired with hybrid assistance — a combination that industry sources and Japanese automotive publications project will produce approximately 394 to 400 horsepower. That figure matches the outgoing A90’s most powerful variant and provides the performance headline that the Supra nameplate demands, but the manner of its delivery will be distinctly different from the BMW straight-six’s broad, muscular torque character. A turbocharged four-cylinder with hybrid assistance produces power differently — with a sharper, more electronic quality to its energy delivery, a higher-revving character at the top of its range and the additional torque fill that hybrid assistance provides at lower engine speeds to compensate for the reduced displacement’s natural mid-range compared with the outgoing six-cylinder.

The engine itself has been designed with meaningful forward-looking flexibility: Toyota’s engineering brief reportedly includes compatibility with carbon-neutral fuels, providing the Mk6 with a pathway through increasingly stringent emissions regulations without requiring fundamental powertrain redesign in markets where synthetic or biofuel availability improves in the coming years. The racing variant of this engine — intended for circuit competition applications including the GR Supra’s ongoing motorsport program — is projected to produce an extraordinary 592 horsepower in racing configuration, a figure that demonstrates the headroom built into the engine’s architecture and that hints at the potential for high-performance road car variants in the Supra’s tradition of producing more powerful special editions over the course of its production life.

Transmission choices for the Mk6 present one of the most interesting and somewhat melancholy engineering challenges that Toyota’s development team faces. The hybrid powertrain’s integration of a motor-generator positioned between the engine and the gearbox — which provides both the hybrid assistance and the ability to disconnect the electric element from the drivetrain — creates significant complexity around the provision of a conventional manual gearbox. Manual transmissions and hybrid systems that must manage motor torque integration are difficult to reconcile mechanically, and the most likely transmission outcomes for the Mk6 are an eight-speed or ten-speed automatic, potentially supplemented by Toyota’s simulated manual gearbox technology. Toyota has been actively developing simulated manual transmission systems — which provide the gear selection interaction and shift feel of a manual without the mechanical connection — for application across its performance lineup, and the Supra is the most appropriate and most commercially significant application for that technology.

The Platform: Everything Is Toyota This Time

Perhaps the most significant structural difference between the A90 and the Mk6 is one that will be invisible to most observers but that represents the deepest possible expression of Toyota’s commitment to a genuinely independent Supra: the platform. The A90’s CLAR architecture was BMW’s design, developed for a broad range of BMW products and adapted for the Supra and Z4 application. Every fundamental parameter of the car’s suspension pickup points, wheelbase geometry, structural rigidity characteristics and electronic system integration points was a BMW engineering decision. Toyota’s engineers worked within those parameters rather than establishing them.

The Mk6’s platform is Toyota’s own — designed from the outset around the specific requirements of a pure sports coupe rather than adapted from a platform conceived for a family of larger, heavier products. This means that every suspension geometry decision, every structural stiffness target, every weight distribution parameter and every electronic integration point will reflect Toyota’s Gazoo Racing engineering philosophy rather than a compromise between Toyota’s preferred approach and the constraints of a shared BMW architecture. The implications for the Mk6’s driving character are potentially significant: a platform designed specifically for a sports coupe by engineers who have spent the last decade developing the GR86, the GR Yaris, the GR Corolla and the A90 Supra itself will carry different tuning priorities and different dynamic signatures than one adapted from BMW’s broader product family.

The body design will also be entirely Toyota’s creation, freed from any architectural constraints imposed by the shared platform with the Z4. Toyota’s Vice President of Marketing Sean Hanley suggested in a 2024 interview that the shape of the new car might change meaningfully — acknowledging openly that the design language of the A90, which was significantly influenced by the shared architecture with the BMW Z4, may evolve in directions that a fully independent Toyota design can explore without constraint. The A90’s proportions were universally admired, but they were not proportions that Toyota’s designers chose in complete creative freedom. The Mk6’s designers will have that freedom for the first time in the modern Supra’s history.

The Mazda Alternative: An Inline-Six Remains Possible

The most surprising and potentially most welcome rumour surrounding the Mk6 concerns the possibility that Toyota’s engineers have not fully abandoned the inline-six configuration — but rather than replacing BMW’s engine with their own six-cylinder, they may be considering a collaboration with Mazda. The speculation centres on Mazda’s 3.3-litre mild-hybrid turbocharged inline-six — an engine developed by Mazda for its own CX-60 and CX-90 models and widely regarded as one of the finest new inline-six engines produced by any Japanese manufacturer in recent memory. An inline-six from Mazda would preserve the traditional configuration that Supra enthusiasts have always associated with the car’s greatest moments — the 2JZ of the A80 was, after all, an inline-six — while ensuring that no BMW components appear anywhere in the Mk6’s specification sheet.

Whether Toyota ultimately adopts Mazda’s engine or proceeds with its own turbocharged four-cylinder hybrid will be one of the most consequential engineering decisions in the Supra’s history. The inline-six option would be enthusiastically received by the community of Supra traditionalists who regard the straight-six configuration as fundamental to the car’s identity. The turbocharged four-cylinder hybrid option would be consistent with Toyota’s broader electrification strategy, would provide better fuel economy and emissions performance across global markets, and would offer the racing engine’s extraordinary 592-horsepower potential as a long-term aspirational target for future high-performance variants.

Why This Matters for the Sports Car World

The Toyota GR Supra Mk6 matters beyond the boundaries of Toyota’s own product lineup for a reason that becomes clear when the broader sports car landscape of 2027 is considered. The BMW Z4, which was the A90’s production partner, ends its run in 2026 without a confirmed successor. The Nissan Z continues in production but faces its own uncertainty regarding long-term viability as electrification regulations tighten. The Mazda MX-5 — the other pillar of the accessible rear-wheel-drive sports car segment — faces similar regulatory headwinds. In this context, a new, fully Toyota-engineered GR Supra arriving in 2027 with approximately 400 horsepower, a hybrid powertrain compatible with carbon-neutral fuels, and a genuine Gazoo Racing engineering pedigree represents something genuinely valuable and genuinely at risk of disappearing: a dedicated, purpose-built, rear-wheel-drive Japanese sports car with serious performance and serious cultural heritage.

The A90’s critics were not wrong about the BMW collaboration’s limitations, but they were wrong to dismiss a car that was, on its own merits, among the finest sports cars of its generation. The Mk6 has the opportunity to make the same case without the asterisk — to be excellent on its own terms, built entirely by the brand whose name it carries, and to carry the Supra nameplate into a new era without any qualification or compromise. After seven years of shared DNA, Toyota is finally going alone. For everyone who has always believed that the Supra deserved to be purely a Toyota, the wait is almost over.

Read: With the GR Supra Gone, the 2027 Nissan Z NISMO Is Now the Sports Car the World Needs

Toyota GR Supra — Generation Comparison Chart

Category	A90 GR Supra (2019–2026)	Mk6 GR Supra (2027 — Expected)
Platform	BMW CLAR (Shared with Z4)	New Toyota In-House Platform
Engine	BMW B58 3.0L Turbo Inline-Six	Toyota 2.0L Turbo Hybrid Four-Cylinder (Primary Rumour)
Alternative Engine	BMW B46 2.0L Turbo Four-Cylinder	Mazda 3.3L Mild-Hybrid Turbo Inline-Six (Secondary Rumour)
Power Output (Road)	382–429 hp (Market Dependent)	~394–400 hp (Projected)
Power Output (Racing)	GR Supra GT4 Competition	Up to 592 hp (Racing Variant)
Hybrid System	No	Yes — Motor-Generator Between Engine and Gearbox
Carbon-Neutral Fuel Compatible	No	Yes — Designed-In Compatibility
Transmission Options	8-Speed Automatic / Manual (Select Markets)	8 or 10-Speed Automatic / Simulated Manual (Likely)
Drivetrain	Rear-Wheel Drive	Rear-Wheel Drive
Production Facility	Magna Steyr — Graz, Austria	Toyota In-House (Location TBD)
BMW Joint Production	Yes — BMW Z4 Twin	No — Toyota Only
Body and Design	Shared Architecture with Z4	Fully Independent Toyota Design
Electronics Architecture	BMW-Derived	Toyota-Developed
Suspension Design	BMW CLAR-Based	Toyota GR-Developed
Production End / Start	March 2026	2027 (Expected)
Final Edition	2026 MkV Final Edition — 1,300 Units (North America)	N/A
U.S. Final Edition Engine	BMW B58 — 382 hp	N/A
Awards (A90)	Golden Steering Wheel 2019, Car and Driver 10Best 2020, Best Handling Car 2020	TBD
Key Competitor	Nissan Z, BMW M2, Porsche 718 Cayman	Nissan Z, Alpine A110, Porsche 718 (Successor)
Starting Price (A90 Final)	$55,650 (U.S.)	TBD — Expected Similar Range