#1 Is Enough Of A Reason For Me To Avoid This Car

4 Reasons why the Toyota GT86 is a bad buy

1. The engine is terrible

I can hear people calling out to the heavens even as I type this. “Ben, you don’t need a lot of horsepower to have fun!” – you’re correct, you don’t need a lot of power at all to have fun. Just look at the Suzuki Swift Sport with 130hp, the Fiesta with 197hp or any Japanese Kei car with a maximum of 64hp.

You don’t need a lot of power to have fun. What you do need, however, is Torque, and the GT86 rivals Honda in the low Torque battle. However, unlike Honda you don’t have a stupid high red-line to make up for the Torque deficit.

Sure, the Suzuki Swift only makes 118lb-ft, but the major difference is that there isn’t a drop in the Torque output equivalent to the Marianas Trench slap bang in the middle of the rev range like on the GT86, and its here that the Toyota’s engine falls completely flat (figuratively and literally).

When I drove it I recall my foot being flat to the floor without much “go” happening. Yes, its fun to rev a car to the redline but with the GT86 it wasn’t fun, it was necessary or else you weren’t going to have any fun at all. It was a chore to wind it up to the red-line and a buzzkill if you fell even a fraction outside of its comfort zone. The engine is in dire need of a retune or a factory fitted turbo.

People constantly state that you can make the car better by doing XYZ modification as soon as you buy it. If you have to modify a car to actually be good the second it exits the showroom, then its not a good car.

Complete list (CarThrottle.com)