Toyoda confirms that Toyota will develop an affordable sports car for the American market

Just the other day Top Speed confirmed that the Toyota/Subaru sports car is a go Well today Akio Toyoda, the Japanese automaker’s new president announced that Toyota will develop an affordable, fun-to-drive sports car for the American market that will go on sale withing the next few years: "I am very excited about it and plan to fast-track it," he said at the Center for Automotive Research’s annual Management Briefing Seminar.

With this sports car Toyota hopes to appeal to a younger group of buyers for whom quality and reliability alone are not enough, however this doesn’t mean that the extremely reliable automaker is headed in a new direction with their lineup. On the contrary, Toyoda said that he wanted Toyota to refocus on core principles and the responsiveness to the consumer that led the company to become the world’s biggest and up until last year, the most profitable mass production car maker on the planet.

Toyoda said that the cost and technological challenges of making affordable, fuel-efficient cars will require industry players to work together. However, in a brief question-and-answer session, Toyoda said his company did not envision aligning themselves with another automakers saying that "Toyota is not the sort of company that is very good at alliances."