Tested: 1979 Toyota Celica Supra

Car and Driver

Our reviews of Toyota’s four- and six-cylinder 2021 Supras are coming on 5/13, until then we decided to look back at where the Supra started. Here’s our road test of the first-generation Supra.

From the July 1979 issue of Car and Driver.

There seems to be no stopping the Japanese. Why, they’ve stolen every­thing that’s sacred to the American way. The McDonald’s stand in downtown Tokyo has been forking over hamburgers like crazy lately, Japanese kids play baseball better than our own Little Leaguers, and if you asked a typical Japanese executive his favorite pastime, chances are he’d shock you with a reply like “Golf!” Shades of Arnold Palmer, what’s next?

History of the Toyota Supra

Before you have a chance to sigh in exasperation, I’ll tell you what’s next. It’s the Monte Carlo. These shrewd folks have up and stolen our Chevrolet Monte Carlo, the middle class’s favorite flagship from Poughkeepsie to Portland. Toyota has ripped off American ingenuity at its finest by copying the Chevy that thinks it’s a Cadillac. Good grief, this new Toyota’s got cruise control, power windows, and door panels dripping with carpet. It idles as smoothly as a turbine and swishes around town with four-speaker stereo and air-conditioned comfort seeping from every pore. They call it the Supra, and these guys mean business.

This new Toyota has everything a luxury car needs but a chauffeur. There’s enough torque under the hood to step you smartly away from the four-­cylinder thingamajigs from Japan without so much as mashing the nap of the carpet under your throttle foot. It has a tilt steering column to play with, upholstery that looks straight out of the imperial palace, and a price tag that will draw all the appropriate oohs and aahs in every Toyota lot across the land. I hope you’re ready, because this is it, folks: the car America’s biggest importer rides out of earth orbit and into financial outer space. This is a TEN-GRAND Toyota. Its maker would like you to realize that it’s no longer a purveyor of cheap, basic transportation. With the Supra, Toyota will hereby be dealing with well-heeled customers who think glamorous thoughts such as “Datsun 280-ZX,” “Thunderbird,” and of course “Monte Carlo.”

Like the other cars in the personalized-luxury class striving toward five­-figure price tags, the Supra will be known for what it has, rather than what it is or does. As we’ve already mentioned, the Supra has enough coin boxes, crystal clocks, and power-this, power-that to keep gadget freaks in ecstasy for years. What this car is is a Celica with a nose job. Whether Toyota stretched its popular sport coupe for a fresh look or for an excuse to tack on an extra pair of cylinders to the Celica’s engine is a moot question, because both changes work to help the Supra do exactly what it’s supposed to do. The long nose apparently makes the buying public think sexy! According to early reports, folks are flocking to showrooms, eager to lay hands on these sensuous sweeps of sheetmetal, and after just one ride around the block under the influence of the Supra’s strong, smooth, six-cylinder engine, they’re goners. Another ten­-grand Toyota out the door.

So it matters little that this car is only half-new. Toyota has changed the right half of the old Celica to tweak America’s luxury heartstrings.

The hardware happens to be the best money can buy, the kind of stuff that keeps your average car crazy up nights, mesmerized by the tech sheet. The new engine is an aluminum-headed, single­-overhead-cam, in-line six, which we’ve all seen (but probably never noticed) hauling around Toyota’s Cressida. However, something new has been added (at least for Toyota), in the form of electronic fuel injection. It’s a Nippon-Denso-made variation of Bosch’s L-Jetronic plumbing that combines an air-flow sensor with an electronic brain to solve rough-running troubles once and for all. We can tell you it works infinitely better than Datsun’s experiments in this area, if only because there’s no fuel shut-off on deceleration, which makes Datsun’s Z-car and 810 unnecessarily jerky to live with. It also matches four­-cylinder Celicas in fuel economy.

This elegant piece of Japanese powerplant engineering is housed in a compartment eight inches longer than a garden-variety Celica’s; five of these inches come from a stretch in the wheelbase. To transmit the 110-horsepower output (20 hp more than a four-cylinder Celica) to the pavement, you’re offered a choice of two transmissions: a five-speed manual, which is only natural since Toyota built its performance reputation in America by being the first to offer such equipment to the masses, and a four­-speed automatic, the industry’s first combination of hydraulic shifting and overdrive in one box.

There’s nothing special about the Supra’s suspension. As with the Celica, there are coil springs all around, MacPherson struts in front, and a live axle in back located by four trailing links and a Panhard rod. A rear anti-sway bar is one Supra piece that not all Celicas enjoy, however.

Toyota has seen fit to bless the Supra with a four-wheel disc-brake system. Even though this firm has claimed it’s been striving for braking excellence for years, this is its first car to benefit from a disc at every corner. We suspect the real motivation is to match the competition part-for-part, but you can’t deny the results. The new system has a linearity in response that you just don’t get with mixed disc and drum brakes. However, using all the stopping potential that’s built into the Supra would be a whole lot easier if the distribution were adjusted to let the front end do more of the work.

As we mentioned earlier, it’s not so much what a car in this class can do, it’s what it’s got. The Supra, like the 280ZX, has a fuel-injected, overhead-cam, six-cylinder engine, a five-speed transmission, and four-wheel disc brakes, plus loads of “luxury” accessories, so the cars are a fair match equipment-­wise. Both come at you with long, sleek noses and flattened-back windshields to suggest there’s true sport to follow. But while the Datsun keeps a tight, selfish look in its rear flanks, the Supra swells up like all Celicas into a bulbous aft cabin. The split in philosophical differences between these cars starts right there at the back seat. Even in 2 + 2 trim, the Z­-car is, quite frankly, a painful experience for full-sized people who try to squeeze behind the driver. The Toyota’s no Checker Superba either, but with a little neck-scrunching and knee-knocking, two, even three, adults can manage in back. The rear seatbacks fold separately to accommodate just about anything you’d like to haul, from ski poles to grandfather clocks. Perhaps this is why Toyota stopped the Supra’s sportiness at the specifications page, and instead nurtured its character as far as practical toward functional luxury.

To see if this discipline worked, we backed up our usual track testing and around-town experiences with a long trip. We set the cruise control at 65 early one morning, motored up California’s backbone just under the speeding­-ticket threshold, and promised ourselves not to stop until the sun set.

According to our acceleration results, the Supra’s only a mite quicker through the gears than a four-cylinder Celica. This doesn’t reveal the car’s true character, however, because the Celica has to work for the speed it delivers, while the Supra moves you about with no particular strain. Midrange torque is the difference, and the Supra has plenty.

It cruises along like an American V-8. We did notice a distinct lack of eagerness crossing the Sierra Madre, however. It seems the Supra’s speed control stops well short of full throttle, so you can lose 10 or 15 mph from a setting if the grade gets steep enough. To keep pace you have to override the servo with your throttle foot.

The Supra’s ride is a page out of Detroit’s car-building textbook. There’s just enough damping to keep you from wallowing after bumps, but not quite enough to prevent awkward motion if you use the brakes, steering, or throttle abruptly. The Supra dives sharply on hard stops, and lists precipitously in rapid cornering. It’s one of those cars that lean first and turn later if you order up a fast lane change, so you feel way more than the Supra’s 2920-pound curb weight when it tries to respond quickly. Around-town maneuverability isn’t much better. The rear axle goes into a horrible tramp at the mere suggestion of simultaneous right turning and hard acceleration. Understeer crops up early to dampen any cornering fun before it builds to serious levels.

So you’re better off cruising in the Supra, instead of trying to make life into one huge gymkhana. Take a long road, add a friend to help man the accessories, and let this Supra show you what Japanese luxury living’s all about.

Rushing into this sort of extravagance can’t be easy for a staunch economy-car maker like Toyota, and it shows in a few areas. The Celica has had a headroom problem since its great 1978 redesign, and the package suffers even more with the Supra. The sunroof takes precious inches overhead, so anybody over 70 inches in height will be constantly brushing his hairdo against the ceiling. The seats are mounted as low to the floor as possible to compensate, and this causes another problem. Since your legs are supported more by the floor than the seat, there’s not much grip between you and the upholstery. As a result, you tend to ramp forward out of the front bucket. Jamming all the luxury hardware behind a Celica-sized instrument panel is another compromise, and equipment overflow has reduced the passenger’s toeboard to a size-six space. Unless you honor Japanese tradition by removing your shoes on entry, it’s hard to stretch your feet out comfortably without cocking them sideways to fit the available space.

Toyota has left us perplexed with a couple of other features as well. Honda’s new Prelude has a sunroof with all the trimmings—what Detroit calls a “moonroof”—with transparent glass in the sliding panel, a second panel to close off the light whenever you like, and an electric motor to do all the work. Toyota’s Supra, by contrast, has a plain, old hand crank to let in the sunshine.

The seatbelts are the old-fashioned two-retractor type, which are cumbersome to use and heavy in your lap because of the buckle’s extra mass. And the Supra’s windshield-mounted radio antenna is one more good idea whose time has not yet come. It doesn’t work any better here than in GM cars, so you’re usually out of an FM station’s range before you leave city limits. Our last gripe is that the power steering is distinctly no-feel, which will no doubt leave dedicated drivers disappointed with the new Supra at the first turn.

There are plenty of things we do like here, however. The instrument panel is neatly laid out, and Toyota has shown great resolve in resisting the usual tacky touches. There’s not a strip of wood­grain in sight, nor is there a digital clock. The well-organized layout of rectangular openings and round dials is refreshingly BMW-like. The displays are clear and easy to read, and all switches (except the cruise controls) are logically spotted about, either on steering-column sticks or in small islands in the greater sea of flat-black padded vinyl that defines the instrument panel. (Cruise-control switches are an awkward reach away, up near the shift lever.)

Two new gimmicks are too good to pass without mention. The Supra has what Toyota calls a “mobile map light,” which resides just under the lid of the center-console box. You can switch it on in place, or pull it off a magnetic mount to shine it around the interior like a searchlight. This car also introduces air vents for back-seat passengers. Each B-pillar has a register with an on/off switch that admits outside air, and only a little extra road noise.

In many respects, luxury is still in the experimental stages as it journeys from Japan to America. Toyota has purposely introduced the Supra with a soft focus to leave an opportunity for future fine­ tuning. There’s a little 280ZX here, and lots of Monte Carlo. Subsequent editions could go either direction. It all depends on what kind of people step up to trade ten grand for the top-rung Toyota.

Counterpoints

Well, it happened again. Another carefully preconceived notion blown out of the water. There I was, all ready to thoroughIy dislike the Supra. I mean a $10,000 Toyota anything seemed a bit much, and could a fuel-injected version of the Cressida’s six-cylinder engine, a longer nose to accommodate it, some luxury gimcrackery, and a silly name be worth five figures? Turns out, yes. The Celica Supra is quiet and comfortable, and it has more performance than I thought old Toyota-san could wring out of an emissions-controlled engine. The power steering, however, is junk. The last smidgen of road feel has been artfully removed, so keeping your Supra tracking in a straight line requires constant attention. Toyota probably won’t be building too many of these ten-grand luxo-sport-tourers, but it will easily sell every one it builds. —Mike Knepper

I really liked the Supra. I love in-line six­-cylinder engines. I’m nuts about great steel sapling-like shift levers. Five-speed transmissions that get sorted out by great steel shift levers have caught my fancy for years. I think that two and a half liters is the big engine of the future. Everything about the Toyota Supra is terrific by me except that they don’t carry my size. I happen to be a 46 Long and the Supra is a 38 Regular at the very most—and 36 Short is probably a more accurate description of the Supra’s interior dimensions. I wedged myself into that neat cockpit, felt the seats, worked the controls, adjusted all the mirrors, and knew how nice it would be to go flogging down some country road. My knee obscured the cruise control. I drove the car for an hour before I knew it had a cruise control. I’m not a claustrophobe, but if I were, the Supra would have pushed all my scream buttons. I hope they’ll call me if they get a 46 Long. —David E. Davis, Jr.

Settling too deeply into the lap of luxury can chafe almost as much as wearing a hair shirt. I am mildly annoyed by the Supra because Toyota seems to have sent its isolation specialists through a refresher course at good old Lincoln Tech. Every trick known to separate the senses of a car’s occupants from their surroundings has been put to use here. Precious little information is allowed to filter in, so driving becomes an exercise in high-level guesswork. Rolling down a window on a mild day gives aid and comfort to neglected sensory inputs, but does nothing for the vapid steering or doughy suspension. Toyota has gone to a great deal of trouble to tell the world about the virtues of the six-cylinder’s increased performance, but not much of it seems to affect the seat of your pants. Come to think of it, isn’t the Supra shunning the signs of the times with its bigger engine and stretched wheelbase? I would have no complaint if the job had been craftily accomplished, but cars should function as something besides numbing tranquilizers, especially for this price. —Larry Griffin

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com