Photo: Ken Saito
This one was a surprise; in fact, I was so surprised I completely ignored it at first and thought they were just a pair of normal AE86s on the stand. I thought, “Oh cool, it’s a nod to their Initial D connection” and moved on. But upon closer inspection, these throwbacks to Toyota’s storied past are actually a prologue of their future. One the one hand is an EV converted 86. Okay, stay with me here, because it gets better. While the original car’s 4A-GE engine has been binned and replaced with an electric motor, it retains a three-pedal and stick shift set up. That’s right, this is the manual EV Lexus have been working on.