Both J-​​Spec and Iron Chef are report­ing this, with prices start­ing around $16, 500 and up based on KMs and trim lev­els for the sexy 1JZ pow­ered four door. The Verossa is still not avail­able how­ever, though most will agree the Mark II is a classier look­ing car, with a much improved inte­rior over the JZX-​​100 Chaser.

More infor­ma­tion as it becomes available.

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Toy­ota CEO Akio Toy­oda, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Cal­i­for­nia gov­er­nor Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger have held press con­fer­ence in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia to announce that both com­pa­nies will be work­ing together on elec­tric vehi­cle devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing, with Toy­ota spend­ing $50 mil­lion in pri­vate place­ment of Tesla stock.

Tesla and Toy­ota plan to use the recently closed ex-​​Toyota NUMMI plant in Freemont, CA, USA with Model S pro­duc­tion expected to bring back 1,000 work­ers and out­put 20,000 cars a year, with that out­put expected to increase as new mod­els are added. The plant could soon expand to as many as 10,000 work­ers, and approach it’s pre­vi­ous capac­ity of 300,000 cars per annum.

The Model S is on track for pro­duc­tion in 2012. No infor­ma­tion is yet avail­able on any tech­nol­ogy or process shar­ing deals between Tesla and Toy­ota, but Tesla is expected to ben­e­fit greatly from Toyota’s mass pro­duc­tion exper­tise and efficiency.

FT-​​86 con­cept no more?

Accord­ing to a report in Auto­car, the FT-​​86 is being turned into yet another bland Toy­ota vehi­cle à la Camry.

The car’s focus is now aimed between 30 and 40 year olds, retains RWD, and will suf­fer in the per­for­mance depart­ment as Toy­ota seek to wring more fuel econ­omy out of the Sub­aru sourced boxer instead of performance.

Toy­ota are also expected to increase the price from around US$20,000 to US$23,000 for a base model, and going as high as US$26,000 for a spec’d up ver­sion. Toy­ota risks alien­at­ing younger, more per­for­mance ori­ented dri­vers with this move, as the com­pany has no sig­nif­i­cant sports vehicles.

Ed: Looks like Toy­ota doesn’t have the stones to make a new sports car, as we saw with the HT-​​FS. Nis­san (370), Mitsu (EVO), Subaru(WRX) and even Hyundai (Gen­e­sis) are fill­ing the gaps here, though not nec­es­sar­ily in the same price bracket.

Source: [Auto­car]