CALTY Design, Toyota’s design HQ in America, is celebrating its 50th anniversary and looking back on all the projects it started only to shelve them for good.
Once, the design team had the idea to spruce up the exterior of the FJ40 Cruiser. It built a life-sized mockup of the SUV and showed it to the management, which reckoned it would not be viable enough.
40 years ago, the company designed what they called the MX-1, a mid-engine coupe concept with guillotine doors. Two years later, they revisited it with lots of bodywork edits and a new steering wheel you could easily detach and reattach on the right or the left side of the dash. It was called MX-2.
The same team came up with the idea of a custom Supra Mk4, which you will also find in the gallery below. As you can see, it looks very little like the car that actually went into production.
In 2012, the automaker’s now-forgotten Scion sub-brand designed an experimental hatchback called NYC to “explore the mobility opportunities in dense urban areas.” It was compact, looked cramped and had the driver and the passenger sitting nearly upright in their seats.