Thirty years apart: living with an A90 while hunting 90s A80s

Spend five minutes in a car comment section and you'll hear the same two takes on repeat. Either the 90s A80 Supra is an untouchable god that came from the factory with 1,000 horsepower, or the modern A90 is just a BMW Z4 in a nicer jacket.

Neither of those holds up once you're standing next to them in a parking lot at midnight.

I daily an A90 around Vancouver and take it up the Sea to Sky in the middle of winter. The rest of the week, I'm out with my phone trying to catch surviving A80s in the wild for my binder. Spending real time around both cars makes you appreciate how differently Toyota approached the same problem thirty years apart.

Why the A80 still owns every meet it pulls into

Pop the hood on a built A80 like the red single-turbo car in slide two and you immediately get why the 2JZ-GTE has the reputation it does. Toyota over-engineered that cast-iron, closed-deck block so heavily in 1993 that people are still making 800+ wheel horsepower on untouched factory bottom ends. Even bone stock, the US-spec Turbo hit 60 mph in 4.6 seconds and stopped from 70 mph in 149 feet, a Car and Driver production-car braking record that stood for seven straight years until the Porsche Carrera GT beat it in 2004.

The catch is what that legend did to the market:

• 11,238 sold new in the US between 1993 and 1998.
• ~12,000 on North American roads today (estimate) once you factor in high survival rates and 25-year JDM imports.
• $95,000 to $150,000 for a clean six-speed Turbo today. Because they trade for supercar money, most owners treat them like museum pieces. You pass ten A90s on the street for every one A80 that actually leaves the garage.

Why the A90 joke aged so badly

When the A90 launched, everyone made the BMW joke. Six years later, nobody at the track is laughing. The B58 3.0L twin-scroll inline-six under the hood is the closest thing the modern car world has to a 2JZ successor. Toyota rated the 2021+ car at 382 hp, which is polite fiction when most stock cars put down nearly that much at the rear wheels.

It's also 83 pounds lighter than a twin-turbo A80 and sits on a 97.2-inch wheelbase, shorter than a GR86. You get full torque at 1,800 rpm, 30 mpg on the highway, and a car you can get covered in road grime on a January mountain run without worrying about hurting its auction value. Clean used 3.0s sit around $48,000 to $58,000 right now, less than half the price of a clean A80 Turbo.

The verdict

The A80 is the poster car. When that silver one showed up in a Vancouver lot at night, it pulled an instant First Print card on Burbles because seeing one out in the wild still feels like an event. The A90 is the car you actually put 20,000 miles a year on.

Someone hands you the keys to one for the next five years and you aren't allowed to sell it. Which Supra are you taking home?

Photos: @troy (Vancouver, BC & Sea-to-Sky Highway). Specs & test data: Toyota USA and Car and Driver archives. North American road count is an estimate from US sales records and 25-year import volume.