The Tokyo Motor Show is home to some of the coolest and strangest concept cars and new cars of any of the major motor shows. You get tiny Kei cars, old-school luxury cars and cars that look like they’re from 100 years in the future.
The biennial show is always one of the highlights of the auto show calendar. Here’s a look at 10 of our favorites from this year’s show.
Sure the Vision concept might be cooler, but we’ve seen almost the same car before. The Kai shows elegant simplicity, with gorgeous body surfacing, and a long-hood profile. The best part of the Mazda Kai is that there’s an excellent chance that what you see on stage is what you’ll see in showrooms in just a few short years.
But this concept car isn’t a high-end sports car, it’s likely going to be the next Mazda 3. Mazda engineers have said that even the deep draw doors are designed to be mass produced. Don’t forget the powertrain here either, it’s Mazda’s crazy new compression ignition gas engine.
Daihatsu’s DN Compagno is a strange one. About as long as a Toyota Yaris hatch, this is a tiny car. But it’s big on style. Just look at that long, sloping, teardrop roofline. And the sharp shoulder line that runs from headlight to taillight. And that grille that looks straight out of 1950.
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The Compagno packs more style into its tiny footprint than most cars three times its size. Take a look inside, and check out the cutting edge digital gauges in retro housings. It’s designed after Daihatsu’s original 1963 Compagno.
The Honda Sports EV concept is the electric car that we need, if not the one that we deserve. The styling borrows some of the best bits from vintage Hondas. It would sit perfectly in the garage next to the Urban EV concept Honda showed earlier this year. That one was the 1970s Civic with the near-future movie filter applied. This one goes a step further back, calling to Honda’s original cars from the 1960s.
Underneath, the Honda Sports EV shares a platform with the Urban EV. Since that car has already been given the production nod, this sporty followup could too.
Subaru’s Viziv Performance concept is supposed to be a look at the next WRX and STI. It looks like somebody used a 3D preinter instead of building a real car out of metal, glass and plastic. But don’t worry. It’s real.
The Viziv takes the Impreza’s hexagon grille and hawk-eye headlamps and turns up the volume. Subaru wasn’t giving out engine information, but it’s a safe bet it’ll be turbocharged and a boxer layout. The production-ready WRX might not get the massive, multisided wheel arches or bulging flares or even the massive rear diffuser, but if the new WRX is just one quarter as cool as this concept, it’s going to be pretty great.
We may have lost new Suzukis to the 2008 recession, but the brand is still alive and well in much of the rest of the world. The E-Survivor concept’s ultra-stripped-down look may be the first glimpse at what the next Jimny might look like.
You might remember the second-generation Jimny as the Samurai. That’s the name it wore when it was sold in the US and Canada. Think of this one like a modern Suzuki X-90.
The new Nissan Leaf NISMO wasn’t really a concept car. Well, maybe it was. Nissan hasn’t said for sure that it will build the car, but it looks as close to production-ready as any concept I’ve ever seen.
This one’s cool because the green Leaf is turning red. It has a lowered suspension, sticky tires and revised motor tuning to make max power and torque available more quickly.
When Nissan teased the car earlier this month, rumors of Ford-Focus-RS-beating performance quickly started making the rounds.
The Toyota Century bowed in 1965 and has had exactly one major redesign since then. In 1997. That’s why this all-new third-generation model is a big deal. The Century is Toyota’s flagship model. Forget S-Class, this is Toyota’s Maybach.
More appropriately, the Maybach is Mercedes-Benz’s Century. The V12 is gone in favor of a hybrid V8 powertrain, but this ultra-luxury sedan is still a big deal for the brand. And high-rollers all over Japan.
Yamaha’s Cross Hub is a compact pickup. And I mean really compact. Think three feet shorter than a Toyota Tacoma. It looks like a regular cab, but there is actually seating for four. The driver’s seat is in the middle, like a McLaren F1. Two passengers sit behind and beside the driver, then there is a fourth seat in the middle behind them. Confusing, but Yamaha says there is room.
Motorcycle and piano-maker Yamaha is no stranger to car-making though. They’ve been building engines since 1967’s Toyota 200GT. You’ll see their tuning fork logo on the Lexus LFA’s engine, and the 1989-1995 Ford Taurus SHO’s V6, among others. But they aren’t forgetting about bikes. The Cross Hub has room in the bed to hold two motorcycles.
You’ve heard the term “box on wheels” before, but the Takayama Micro Freedom takes that to a whole new level. It’s completely square and designed to use every inch of Japan’s Kei car dimensions.
The Micro Freedom is designed to be a multi-use space. It’s a car, but it can also be a mobile office. Or, like the display concept, it can have a slide-out body that doubles the size of the car when parked. Set up like that, the Micro Freedom can even be a tiny food truck.
The Lexus LS+ looks similar to the LF-FC that Lexus debuted at the 2015 Tokyo show, but it has some big changes. Like a whole new grille that ramps the Lexus spindle up to 11.
The hydrogen fuel cell is gone too. Instead, the LS+ offers what Lexus calls Highway Teammate. It’s a big pile of self-driving tech that lets the car merge, change lanes and follow the car in front. Lexus wants that technology in a road car by 2020. But probably not in a body this cool.
Even more impressively, Lexus says that the car’s connection to a central server lets it not just update software in real time, but to “learn and grow along with its users.”
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