BMW guts or not, I was adamant that the 2020 Toyota Supra felt like it had more than the reported 335 horsepower and 365 lb-ft of torque. The car can seriously move, and when Car and Driver revealed a 3.8 second zero to 60 mph time we all started to wonder how much power it really put down. Now the latest dyno test reveals that, at least on the media tester cars we’ve seen so far, the advertised power figures are closer to what the car puts down at the wheels—not at the crank.
The dyno test comes from Motor Trend, which put a Supra press loaner to the test on a Mustang eddy-current chassis dynamometer at World Motorsports in Torrance, California. Their result? A pretty impressive 332 HP and 387 lb-ft to the rear wheels.
For our test, we ran the Supra in sixth gear because its 1.00:1 ratio is the transmission’s most efficient. The horsepower number that the dyno read was just off from what Toyota claims, but the torque figure is considerably higher.
What’s more, the numbers that Toyota promises are taken at the crank, which doesn’t account for the frictional and hydraulic losses occurred in the transmission and differential. Conventional wisdom suggests these could amount to roughly 15 percent for a driveline like the Supra’s, which would suggest our Supra was making 390 hp and 455 lb-ft at the crank.
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That dyno result is great, but it is less than the 339 HP and 427 lb-ft at-the-wheel rating that Car and Driver came up with during a test at Livernois Motorsports and Engineering in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Quite a bit less in the torque department.
But even that result was somewhat disputed at the time. And as Motor Trend admitted, this car is a press loaner—for various reasons it could be a ringer of sorts, “tuned to produce extremely impressive performance numbers in hopes of selling more cars.”
At the same time, it’s pretty common knowledge that modern BMW engines are fairly underrated from the factory, so these results are not exactly surprising to me.
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What I’m really curious to see is how the dyno tests go for the actual customer cars. But none of that changes the fact that the new Supra is fast and very fun to drive. Anyone willing to plunk down $55,000 for this German-designed, Japanese-tuned, Austrian-assembled wonder-coupe is in for a good time.
Go read Motor Trend for the full story.
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