What would the world be like if the concept of global warming never caught on?
Your heating bills would be lower, there’d be no such thing as a vegan sausage roll and most of the world’s great art wouldn’t have orange paint all over it. But what about the cars?
I appreciate that some of you reading this will have a ground source heat pump and an electrical car, and that you holiday in a tent to cut your carbon emissions, and I promise I’m not going to be wilfully provocative. I agree with you that the world is heating up, so let’s move on and ponder for a little while what the world might feel like today if the concept of global warming had never really caught on.
What if we dismissed it as something Margaret Thatcher invented in the ’80s to use against the miners? What if we noticed the rise in temperatures and said, “Yeah, but it was a damn sight hotter than this before records began”? What if we didn’t hold Greta Thunberg aloft as a sort of Mayan Nostradamus and instead saw her as a rather spoiled little girl whose silly parents allowed her to sit in the school playground all day, rather than telling her to go inside to learn something?
How would things be if we’d done all that? Well, there’d be no such thing as Ed Miliband, that’s for sure, and you wouldn’t have to go through the Hyde Park underpass at 40km/h. What’s more, your heating bills would be lower, there’d be no such thing as a vegan sausage roll and most of the world’s great art wouldn’t have orange paint all over it.
On the road, it’s possible the electric car would have made a comeback. Some people like the bang/nothing torque delivery and enjoy driving along listening to the tyres. But there’d be no government discounts or pan-European drive to make them mainstream. They’d just be a curiosity for the few. Like boned pigeon.
The Toyota Prius? That might well have happened, even if climate change was seen as some sort of mad Scientology-type cult for the world’s flat-Earth anti-vaxxers. Using electrical assistance to create greater fuel economy would have been appealing to many, and certainly to Uber, which would also have happened. Electric buses would certainly have come along too because they make life so much better for people in cities.
Who knows? If the world hadn’t been propelled by its fear of rising temperatures, maybe some of the money being hurled into the development of alternative energy sources could have been spent developing a global system of hydrogen delivery. That would have been very cool. And indeed cooling.
But for the most part cars would have continued along the same trajectory, getting better, more reliable and safer. And their engines would have got smoother and more powerful and more economical until we ended up with something not far removed from the Toyota GR Supra. I mean it. While the rest of Toyota has been busying itself with the whims of the world’s politicians, and working hard to make the Prius even more champagne socialist, it seems that they’ve had a special roomful of engineers who were allowed no access to the outside world. People who therefore have no clue about the plight of the polar bear or the high-water mark in Tuvalu.
I reviewed the Supra when it came along five years ago and described it as neither over nor underwhelming. It was just whelming. But the new version I’m reviewing today is the GR. Which is short, I think, for Grrrr. When a Toyota says GR on the back, petrolheads pay attention. I was therefore expecting great things, but first there’s the problem of getting inside. Five years ago, when I tried the old car, it was a struggle, but today I’m considerably fatter, so it was nigh-on impossible. The problem is the door, which is just too small. It’s like climbing into a postbox, but if you can manage it there’s actually quite a lot of space.
Now, first things first, this may be a Supra but it’s nothing like the Supra from the ’90s. That, like the Nissan 300ZX, and to a lesser extent the Mitsubishi Starion, was part of Japan’s attempt to give the Chevrolet Corvette a kicking. It was unnecessarily big and childish and American, and I actually rather liked it.
Today’s Supra is aimed more at the European sports car market. Which is why it shares a great many parts – by which I mean the engine and gearbox – with the BMW Z4. And now it’s been breathed on by the team that brought us that modern-day Lancia Integrale, the GR Yaris.
It’s not the best-looking car in the world. It put me in mind of a chap who’s spent way too much time in the gym, building up muscles and bulges that aren’t strictly necessary for everyday living. But it does have purpose. And the figures suggest it isn’t all show and no go. The straight-six, old-skool turbo engine produces 335bhp, and in a car this size that’s a lot.
There’s more old-skool stuff, such as, for example, a manual gearbox in the car I drove. It took a while to reacquaint myself with this technology and, while I’d love to be all misty-eyed and nostalgic, it did feel as though I’d gone from a laptop to a sit-up-and-beg typewriter. I’d specify the flappy paddles if I were you. Unless you are the sort of person who thinks your TV remote is witchcraft.
Much better blasts from the past are the actual knobs for the stereo and the heating system. You don’t have to use the touchscreen at all to be warmer or to make the radio go away. And then there’s the nanny state stuff. For some reason this car doesn’t sound a klaxon if you stray slightly over the speed limit. There are no T. rex escape warning lights either. Just a discreet symbol on the dash, a polite “ahem” from the on-board butler to suggest that “Sir might want to slow down a tad”. This alone makes the Supra worth buying.
And there’s more. It rides beautifully, the back end is wonderfully loose when the road’s greasy and the speed is slap bang in the middle of the ballpark marked fun without being scary. And you can engage Sport mode, which just makes everything a bit better.
It’s not like riding around in the olden days, despite the gearbox and the knobs. It’s like riding around in what the olden days might have been like if global warming had never happened. It feels like what the car could have been if it had been left to its own devices. Analogue.
The GR Supra hasn’t won much praise from my colleagues in the specialist press. But I rather liked it. Obviously I’d never buy one and neither would you if you are either tall or fat, or both. You’d be better off with a Porsche or an Alpine. Or the Yaris GR. But it has something, this car. So if you’re short, put it on the list as a maybe.
Toyota GR Supra 3.0 Pro Manual
ENGINE: 2998cc, 6 cylinders, turbo, petrol
PERFORMANCE: 0-62mph; 4.6sec, top speed 155mph
PRICE: $113,000
JEREMY’S RATING: 4/5
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