Fool Me Twice, Shame on... Toyota?

Like Toyota has anything to do with that car, anyway

Trigger Warning: I’m going be pretty uncool about a bunch of people in the paragraphs to come, largely because I made EXACTLY the same mistake 21 years ago, in an incident I’ll relate next week. I know how stupid the individuals involved are, because I have personally been that stupid!

It pains me to say this, but: The Subaru BRZ and its various Toyota-badge-engineered variants are the worst thing that has happened to non-parking-lot-centric automotive enthusiasm since… I don’t know, the RX-8? There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is the BRZ itself. It’s a joy to drive like almost no production car of the past two decades. The chassis is lovely in all of its minor variations. Coupled with the… ahem… modest power available, it becomes a car that almost anyone can drive well and that talented people can drive very well. It’s a total overdog for SCCA Time Trial, various autocross classes, and just about anywhere else it’s found. I’d say it’s the best “driver’s car” you can buy for reasonable money today…

…with the worst engine you can possibly imagine. When the Subaru-sourced flat-four is running well, it’s a charmless, buzzy, flat-feeling piece of dogshit, with all the dynamic character of an Eighties Iron Duke minus the willingness to rev past five grand. When it’s not running well, which is often the case, it’s a hand grenade. The BRZ is the only brand-new production car I’ve ever driven that CAUGHT FIRE on a road course. (Willow Springs, November 16, 2013. Burned the nose off when an injector seal let go, a failure that is depressingly common and frequent in this car.)

This “joint venture” between Toyota and Subaru has all the pathetic failings of Fuji Heavy Industries, from an inexhaustible appetite for service to shiny plastic that rubs to black with finger pressure. Had Toyota built this car for real, with a 2.4-liter Camry engine, it would be the greatest car ever built, the hardtop Miata we’ve always wanted plus more.

To be a BRZ owner is to experience what it was like to be married to Ike Turner. So much love and ecstasy, punctuated by periodic bouts of having your ass kicked in public by the one you adore. And yet it’s such an attractive proposition that it has effectively closed off the market to competitors. You’d think that Mazda could wipe the thing off the map with a 2.5-liter hardtop Miata, and they could — but the cost proposition of building such a car to only capture half of the BRZ’s modest sales isn’t worth the effort. So the existence of the BRZ doesn’t just make its owners miserable. It makes everyone miserable, because it keeps reliable competitors from appearing.

Subaru and Toyota know the car is unreliable and that the engines they’ve chosen aren’t up to the task, so they’ve been playing defense for a long time. Early BRZ buyers were given SCCA memberships and one free autocross. But if you actually participated in that autocross, and Subaru found out, they’d put you on a warranty-voided list, nationwide. So it’s long been the custom for the “86 coupes” to appear at everything from Chin Trackdays to SCCA ProSolo Nationals with their license plates removed and their VINs taped over. There’s a whole cottage industry for “VIN protectors” now, with just two classes of customer: exotic-car rental operations that like to semi-fraudulently release their victims back into the auction channels afterwards as privately-owned creampuffs, and people who drive a Subaru BRZ.

What a non-surprise, then, to learn that a fellow named Blake Alvarado just experienced something similar with the new-generation Toyota GR86. Apparently Toyota gives you a free NASA license and trackday with every purchase — but when Blake’s engine decided to ingest some sealant and blow up (“A well-known and warrantable defect occurring since 2013!” he yells on Facebook, perhaps not realizing the irony of that) the nice people at Gulf States Toyota, who import and sell the car, told him to fukoff! He declined to pay the $11,000 bill for an installed new engine (a figure that no doubt has owners of the Porsche M96 and M97 hand grenades salivating in naked envy) and instead went to a Subaru dealer who sold him a junkyard pull for seven grand, installed (see previous comment, but make it in ALL CAPS).

Blake is very angry, because he thinks Toyota should pay for damage incurred at a trackday in which they encouraged him to participate. I’d say that he has a bit of a moral point, at least on the surface of things, but like many people in the car hobby, including the vast majority of autowriters, he simply doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.