Toyota MR2: roof down, mid-engine fun for £3000

Having pared as much steel, aluminium, plastic, rubber, fabric and glass from this car as they felt they could get away with, Toyota’s weight-shaving engineers reckoned that any driver of this sylphic machine should try just as hard to minimize the load.

To ensure that their mission was honoured, said engineers provided this car with laughably little storage space, unless you were prepared to travel one-up and use the passenger seat and its footwell to stuff in more stuff.

Toyota’s third generation MR2, which appeared in time for the new century’s dawn in 1999, had no boot, and so little room under the bonnet that the desperate could stuff only shoes or a washbag into the spare wheel to supplement the glovebox and a pair of small cubbies behind the front seats. A dirty weekend in this car would be just that. Toyota’s weight-saving aims trimmed the MR2’s heft to 960kg and usefully reduced its size compared to the previous model, besides providing a neatly folding hood. It wasn’t as light as a Lotus Elise which could weigh as much as 210kg less, but it was a lot more affordable, slightly more civilized and almost as much fun.

The simplification mission extended to this tiny Toyota’s specification, which provided the choice of one engine – a 136bhp 1.8 litre – and initially one five-speed gearbox. Later there would be an automatic, and later still the addition of a sixth speed for both transmissions. That added weight, and so did extra stiffening to the body’s nose and tail – not that it was a wobbler in the first place – and an increase in wheel diameter from 15in to 16in, but the revised 2002 MR2 was still a light car for light travellers.

The lightness made the 138bhp a lot stronger than it sounds, revvy romps to 62mph possible in 7.9sec, which was swift enough to be exciting on sinuous twisties. And very exciting on the test route of the European launch, held in the hills of a Mediterranean island whose name has shamefully slipped your reporter’s memory. It wasn’t hard to discover the MR2’s fine chassis balance on these roads, which seemed to have been sheened with graphite, diesel, sand or some other slippery substance that had you wondering at the Toyota’s roadholding, if not its controllability.

Later drives on roads closer to home soon confirmed that it was the surface, not the Toyota, that lacked grip. It was a car that was all about the driving, though in this case to the exclusion of almost everything other than rain, which was very effectively repelled by its neatly folding roof.

The result was a car that captured more of the character of the legendary 1985 MR2, and with the added bonus of a fully removable roof, if not a boot to add civility to any long-distance adventuring. Such inconveniences limited sales less than you might expect, the last of the line MR2 more common than you might expect.