Hey, Hey, Hakone! Green and Bronze 2025 Toyota GR86 Hakone Edition Returns
Deep green paint and bronze wheels make this special edition stand out from the GR86 crowd.
The 2025 Toyota GR86 is a great affordable sports car, full stop. It pairs modest but appropriate power with a great chassis and sharp, engaging handling no matter which version of the 86 you pick. The 2025 Toyota GR86 Hakone Edition doesn’t change the fundamental calculus at all, and that’s a good thing. What it does bring is a sharp aesthetic, some very small ride and handling tweaks, and a cool name back to the party.
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Back? Well, the last-generation 86 had a Hakone model as well, and it was very similar. Deep green paint, bronze wheels, tan-accented interior. And that’s the same basic formula here: the 2025 Hakone, based on the Premium trim GR86, gets Ridge Green exterior paint, 18-inch bronze-painted wheels, a ducktail spoiler, black accents, and the requisite “Hakone” callout badges and so forth. (You don’t want to forget that you paid extra—how much extra, Toyota isn’t saying yet—for the cool Hakone look, now do you?)
Mechanically, the Hakone is basically unchanged. There’s still the Subaru-derived 228-hp, 184 lb-ft 2.0-liter H-4 under the hood, there’s still a choice of a six-speed manual or an automatic transmission, it’s still rear-drive. Toyota has tweaked the Sachs dampers by an unspecified amount to “improve handling,” and has likewise retuned the electronic power steering a bit. This is probably the performance package hardware introduced for the 2024 model year, but Toyota isn’t saying that in so many words. Toyota also says its remapped the control software a bit for better punch off the line and upshift/downshift blipping.
The Hakone Edition—all 860 units earmarked for our market—start arriving at dealers this fall. Pricing (and hopefully some more specifics about the hardware and software upgrades) will be available closer to the on-sale date.
Like a lot of the other staffers here, Alex Kierstein took the hard way to get to car writing. Although he always loved cars, he wasn’t sure a career in automotive media could possibly pan out. So, after an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Washington, he headed to law school. To be clear, it sucked. After a lot of false starts, and with little else to lose, he got a job at Turn 10 Studios supporting the Forza 4 and Forza Horizon 1 launches. The friendships made there led to a job at a major automotive publication in Michigan, and after a few years to MotorTrend. He lives in the Seattle area with a small but scruffy fleet of great vehicles, including a V-8 4Runner and a C5 Corvette, and he also dabbles in scruffy vintage watches and film cameras.
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