Toyota made what you’d call a last minute change to its GR 86 coupe that’s so small you’d hardly notice it at all. It’s ironic that the purpose of this change is to make the small boxer coupe more visible online.
A lot of modifications were made to the 2022 sports car, such as a larger 2.4-liter engine and yet another name. The car that started life as the Scion FR-S and evolved into the Toyota 86 in North America, and was also known as GT86 in Europe, and FT-86 in Nicaragua and Jamaica, became GR 86 to reference Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division and tie it in with the GR Supra and GR Yaris hot hatch.
Toyota changed its name quietly, adding the number “GR86” to the end of the alphabet. Thus, the “GR 86” became “GR86”. That might seem like a pointless change, but there’s a very good reason behind the move.
Customers had to search online for the vehicle more difficult because the space between numbers and letters made it hard to locate the vehicle. However, internet searches and hashtag searches (especially on social media) would show the numbers and letters as separate entities, #GR #86 rather than #GR86. The shift doesn’t change the car’s physical badges, only the way Toyota communicates the GR86’s name.
Similar: The 2022 Toyota GR 86 arrives in December priced at $27,700
The change has already been rolled out to Toyota’s Japanese and North American retail websites, and will be soon be adopted by its UK arm. “It has to do with SEO,” a Toyota GB spokesman told CarScoops. “We want people to be able to find the car easily when looking online.”
This seems strange considering that Toyota has not seen the vehicle for several months. We’re not sure how this will affect things like vehicles handbooks and printed brochures in the U.S., where the GR86 is expect to land in dealerships in December. But it’s going to be less of a problem in Europe, which won’t be getting its first allocation of cars until spring 2022 at the earliest.
