{"id":3742,"date":"2026-01-06T03:57:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T11:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/max2voyages.com\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2026-01-06T03:57:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T11:57:33","slug":"yes-the-ae86-bev-concept-is-an-ev-but-it-has-a-manual-and-is-a-blast-to-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/?p=3742","title":{"rendered":"Yes, the AE86 BEV Concept Is an EV, but It Has a Manual (!) and Is a Blast to Drive"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You would never think a 42-year-old Toyota Corolla<\/u> would solve almost every problem car enthusiasts have with electric cars, yet here we are. Meet the AE86<\/u> BEV Concept, and while we\u2019re not really sure if it\u2019s a Toyota or a Lexus, we are sure it\u2019s totally awesome. Why? Because we blasted this diminutive electric sports car around the mean streets of L.A.\u2019s Little Tokyo. Fast? Check. Fun? Ridiculous amounts. Light? How does 2,300 pounds sound? Manual, as in a real manual transmission with a clutch pedal, and none of that fake shift nonsense? Yes sir\/ma\u2019am. What is the range? Well, it\u2019s sort of like the price\u2014better left unsaid. So what is this car, exactly? <\/p>\n

The Classic<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The AE86 BEV Concept began its life in 1983 as a Toyota Corolla Levin Apex<\/u>. America never got to experience the Levin, though we did get the mechanically identical Trueno. A long story told as shortly as possible, the Corolla Levin had fixed headlights, and the Trueno came with popups. Also, levin is the Middle English word for lightning; trueno is thunder in Spanish. <\/p>\n

Beginning in 1983, the Levin came packing the legendary 4A-GE powerplant, a naturally aspirated DOHC 16-valve inline-four that was good for 118 horsepower and 105 lb-ft of torque. These numbers sound silly low today, but when the Acura Integra showed up in 1986, it only made 113 hp. The Trueno we got\u2014called the Corolla GTS\u2014only made 112 hp and 100 lb-ft of twist because of emissions. <\/p>\n

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That wasn\u2019t a lot of power, but the car carried just more than a ton of weight: 2,100 pounds, to be pretty much exact. To refresh our memory (the last time this author drove a Corolla GTS was around the time Nirvana\u2019s \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d made its MTV debut), we arranged for a pristine, sub-40,000-mile, gorgeous red Hachi Roku (Corolla GTS) to appear alongside the AE86 BEV Concept. This little amount of power never felt like so much fun. <\/p>\n

In fact, the car actually felt torquey. That\u2019s no big surprise considering the light weight, yet we were still amazed. We loved how quick and direct everything felt. That could be down to the lack of power steering, but it drove like there was almost nothing between us and the road (don\u2019t check the crash ratings). We had sadly, stupidly, forgotten why exactly AE86 life is a thing, and why the Corolla GTS is such a performance icon. <\/p>\n

Meet the Sacrilege<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When you\u2019re turning a beloved international performance icon into a damn electric car, nothing is sacred. We\u2019ll get to the why in a moment, but a group of Lexus engineers ripped out the entire drivetrain from the 1983 car, including the 4A-GEC engine and the sweet five-speed manual gearbox. The rear seats, too. Under the hood you\u2019ll find the hybrid motor from a Toyota Tundra bolted up to the six-speed manual out of a 2023 Toyota GR86<\/u>. <\/p>\n

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Yes, the AE86 BEV concept car has an actual manual transmission. Where the rear passengers and the luggage once went sits an 18.1-kWh battery out of the Lexus RX450h+ PHEV<\/u>. The engineers also threw in a padded roll cage to stiffen things up, as well as some diamond plating in the pedal box area. According to Lexus, the vehicle weighs 2,356 pounds, up from the donor car\u2019s 2,116. Lexus assures us, however, the power-to-weight ratio is essentially identical between the two cars. <\/p>\n

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The AE86 isn\u2019t just bolted together from random bits; it\u2019s impressively engineered. Electric vehicles typically don\u2019t need gears for several reasons, one being that electric motors are efficient at essentially every point in the rpm range. Why shift when you can just spin the motor faster and use the same amount of power? To wit, the Tundra motor can spin up to 20,000 rpm. But the Lexus team (led by 40-year Toyota\/Lexus veteran Kenji Arai) limited the AE86 BEV version\u2019s motor speed to just 6,000 rpm. This means you have to shift gears, which, you know, is fun! <\/p>\n

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You would never think a 42-year-old Toyota Corolla would solve almost every problem car enthusiasts have with electric<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-drives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/max2voyages.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}