Sold for US$ 2.5 million, Toyota model is most valuable Japanese car at auction

A Toyota car was sold at a collector car auction in Florida, United States, on Friday (4), for US$ 2.5 million (about R$ 12.6 million). As you can imagine, this wasn’t a Rav4 Hybrid, the brand’s hit SUV. Yes, car prices have gone up a lot, but not that much.

This particular Toyota’s model was genuinely the rarest of the rare. It was a Toyota 2000GT, a car produced from 1967 to 1971. Only 351 were made. And this is more than just a Toyota. It has another name attached to it, making it a 1967 Toyota-Shelby 2000GT. Keen observers of automobile history may remember the name “Shelby” as that of the world-famous racing driver and manufacturer Carroll Shelby.

The Toyota-Shelby 2000GT was built in 1966 and is technically a pre-production model. It had the chassis number MF10-10001, meaning it was the first 2000GT to even get a serial number.

It was originally painted red and used as a demo car in the United States, allowing Toyota to show the product to American customers. After some time, along with two other 2000 GTs, it was given to driver Shelby so he could turn them into race cars. The plan was to give the 2000GT some pedigree real lane for marketing purposes.

That’s why, while other Toyota 2000GTs can be worth over R$1 million (or around R$5 million), making them some of the most valuable Japanese cars in the world, this one in particular was worth three times as much. The price makes this vehicle the most valuable Japanese car ever sold at auction. The event took place at the Gooding & Co collector car auction. Amelia Island. The final sale price includes a fee of approximately 10% paid to the auction company. The buyer’s name was not revealed.

In the late 1960s, Toyota was known as a supplier of cheap vehicles to anyone who wanted a Japanese car. Wanting to change that image, Toyota had its designer Satoru Nozaki create the 2000GT, a sports car that looked much more like a Ferrari than a Toyota Crown or Corona, cars already known by the brand at the time.

It wasn’t Toyota’s first sports car. The beautiful 44-horsepower Sports 800 had been released two years earlier. But the 2000GT was on a whole different level. With a starting price of over US$7,000 (about R$35,400), the equivalent of about US$60,000 today (or about R$303,700), the cost of a 2000 GT was higher than the cost of a Porsche 911 or Jaguar XKE at that time. And much more than any Toyota model.

With the money, buyers received real performance. The six-cylinder engine of the 2000GT, created with the help of Yamaha, could have an output of up to 150 horsepower and take the car from zero to 96 kilometers per hour in 10 seconds. Acceleration could easily be beaten by a modern family car like a Toyota Highlander hybrid SUV, but the 2000GT speed was respectable, if not surprising, in its time.

One of the reasons the 2000GT wasn’t as popular in the 1960s as Toyota had hoped — the company had planned to make up to 1,000 units a year, according to Gooding — was that it wasn’t as fast as its European competitors, he said. John Wiley, a collector car value analyst at Hagerty Automotive Intelligence. Still, it was the first true “world-class” Japanese sports car.

The real problem was simply cost, although, according to Gooding, Toyota was losing too much money on each car to continue production.

Toyota declined to comment on the reasons for the decision, taken a long time ago, to stop making the car. Ben Hsu, author of a book on classic Japanese high-performance automobiles, cited the cost of manufacture and lack of demand. Toyota had gone further, on price and prestige, than customers were willing to go.

“Once you get to that level, people are buying the status, and the badge matters,” he opined.

The interior of the 2000GT was finished with the same wood used for Yamaha grand pianos, according to Hsu’s book. With its wooden rim and three thin spokes, the steering wheel of the 2000GT looked like it belonged in an expensive Italian or British sports car. The fact is that a Toyota 2000GT actually appeared in a James Bond movie, “You Only Live Twice With 007”. The car in the 1967 film was a “convertible” version without any styling, because Sean Connery, the Bond at the time, was too tall to fit the vehicle. The 2000GT was never produced as a convertible. The James Bond link also added to the car’s collectible value, Wiley said.

Racer and fitter Shelby made several changes to prepare the 2000GT for racing. Among other things, the rosewood panel was replaced with painted and textured metal, and adjustable KONI bumpers were added, as well as a protective bar for safety. Engine power output has been increased to 210.

He also repainted the car in white and a bright blue. The model now sold was used as a development model by Shelby and kept as an alternate in case one of the other two fails to race. At the end of the 1968 racing season, Shelby’s Toyotas finished fourth in their racing series, behind Porsche and Triumph models, according to Gooding.

One of the other Toyota-Shelby 2000GTs is at the Toyota Automobile Museum in Japan, but it has been repainted and no longer looks like the original, according to Gooding. The other is in a private car collection somewhere in the United States.

The only other Japanese car with values ​​close to the Toyota 2000GT is the much newer Lexus LFA. An exotic car produced by Toyota’s luxury division from 2010 to 2012, the LFA also had an engine produced in collaboration with Yamaha, in this case a V10.

Only 500 were made with prices starting at US$ 375 thousand (about R$ 1.9 million). As with the 2000GT, Toyota struggled to sell them all during production, as Hsu said, but prices soared after production ended.

An especially rare Nürburgring Edition LFA, named after the famous German race track, sold at auction last August for $1.6 million.