Back in my day, it was such a big story that Chevrolet wasn't making a Corvette for the 1983 model year that it was headline-grabbing, interrupt-the-series-finale-of-M*A*S*H-worthy. These days, Toyota discontinues its MkV GR Supra—this one for sale down in Columbus, Ohio, is a 2022—and hardly anyone notices.
MkV, or "Mark Five", denotes the fifth generation of the Supra, GR is for Toyota's Gazoo Racing division.
Granted, the Toyota Supra nameplate isn't nearly as famous as the Chevrolet Corvette's not to mention there was a 16-year gap in production of a "Supra". Still though, for a car as amazing as these cars were, you'd think there'd be more of a story here.
Toyota introduced the fifth generation Supra in 2019 as a 2020 model and sold about 30,400 of them in the U.S. through June 2026. It wasn't poor sales that did it in, though. The BMW Z4, the car with which this generation of the Supra was jointly developed, also ended production. Toyota says fifth generation Supra production ended in spring 2026, while BMW ended Z4 production in March.
BMW and Toyota's collaboration dates to 2012, when the companies agreed to jointly develop architecture and components for a future sports car. Toyota chief engineer Tetsuya Tada has said he was pulled away from the Toyota 86's launch in Spain and sent to BMW's headquarters in Munich to explore whether the two companies could build a sports car together.
Toyota didn't have a lightweight, contemporary rear-wheel-drive platform and high-performance inline-six combination suited to the kind of performance Supra purists would demand. BMW did. The result was a shared architecture underneath two very different cars: the BMW Z4 roadster and Toyota Supra.
Working with BMW also allowed the two companies to share development and engineering costs, making it something of a marriage of convenience. Tada has said developing the Supra entirely on its own would have added years to the project and potentially pushed its price far beyond what Toyota considered appropriate for a Toyota sports car.
As purpose-built, high-performance sports cars go, these cars may just have been the greatest ones ever sold. Aesthetically, in my opinion, they come up way short. They're cool in a way even the sexiest crossovers today simply aren't, but this is not a beautiful car; frankly, it's almost ugly.
Where these cars really fall down is in being anything other than two-passenger performance machines that can rip your retinas from the back of your eyes. They're hard to get in and out of, uncomfortable and cramped, visibility is atrocious, and they're all but useless as overnight road-trip vehicles. Unless you're OK with recycling your clothing—or worse yet, your underwear.
Toyota first introduced the Supra in the U.S. in 1979 as the Celica Supra. It became its own model in 1986, when the third-generation A70 Supra split from the Celica. Toyota changed the sports-car landscape with its A80 Supra in 1993, but it remained a low-volume car in the U.S. and disappeared from the American market after the 1998 model year. Production continued in Japan until 2002.
The MkV's end doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Supra name. Toyota has not announced a successor, but company officials have said a next-generation Supra is a goal.
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