Yes, the AE86 BEV Concept Is an EV, but It Has a Manual (!) and Is a Blast to Drive

You would never think a 42-year-old Toyota Corolla would solve almost every problem car enthusiasts have with electric cars, yet here we are. Meet the AE86 BEV Concept, and while we’re not really sure if it’s a Toyota or a Lexus, we are sure it’s totally awesome. Why? Because we blasted this diminutive electric sports car around the mean streets of L.A.’s Little Tokyo. Fast? Check. Fun? Ridiculous amounts. Light? How does 2,300 pounds sound? Manual, as in a real manual transmission with a clutch pedal, and none of that fake shift nonsense? Yes sir/ma’am. What is the range? Well, it’s sort of like the price—better left unsaid. So what is this car, exactly?

The Classic

The AE86 BEV Concept began its life in 1983 as a Toyota Corolla Levin Apex. America never got to experience the Levin, though we did get the mechanically identical Trueno. A long story told as shortly as possible, the Corolla Levin had fixed headlights, and the Trueno came with popups. Also, levin is the Middle English word for lightning; trueno is thunder in Spanish.

Beginning in 1983, the Levin came packing the legendary 4A-GE powerplant, a naturally aspirated DOHC 16-valve inline-four that was good for 118 horsepower and 105 lb-ft of torque. These numbers sound silly low today, but when the Acura Integra showed up in 1986, it only made 113 hp. The Trueno we got—called the Corolla GTS—only made 112 hp and 100 lb-ft of twist because of emissions.

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That wasn’t a lot of power, but the car carried just more than a ton of weight: 2,100 pounds, to be pretty much exact. To refresh our memory (the last time this author drove a Corolla GTS was around the time Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made its MTV debut), we arranged for a pristine, sub-40,000-mile, gorgeous red Hachi Roku (Corolla GTS) to appear alongside the AE86 BEV Concept. This little amount of power never felt like so much fun.

In fact, the car actually felt torquey. That’s no big surprise considering the light weight, yet we were still amazed. We loved how quick and direct everything felt. That could be down to the lack of power steering, but it drove like there was almost nothing between us and the road (don’t check the crash ratings). We had sadly, stupidly, forgotten why exactly AE86 life is a thing, and why the Corolla GTS is such a performance icon.

Meet the Sacrilege

When you’re turning a beloved international performance icon into a damn electric car, nothing is sacred. We’ll get to the why in a moment, but a group of Lexus engineers ripped out the entire drivetrain from the 1983 car, including the 4A-GEC engine and the sweet five-speed manual gearbox. The rear seats, too. Under the hood you’ll find the hybrid motor from a Toyota Tundra bolted up to the six-speed manual out of a 2023 Toyota GR86.

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Yes, the AE86 BEV concept car has an actual manual transmission. Where the rear passengers and the luggage once went sits an 18.1-kWh battery out of the Lexus RX450h+ PHEV. The engineers also threw in a padded roll cage to stiffen things up, as well as some diamond plating in the pedal box area. According to Lexus, the vehicle weighs 2,356 pounds, up from the donor car’s 2,116. Lexus assures us, however, the power-to-weight ratio is essentially identical between the two cars.

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The AE86 isn’t just bolted together from random bits; it’s impressively engineered. Electric vehicles typically don’t need gears for several reasons, one being that electric motors are efficient at essentially every point in the rpm range. Why shift when you can just spin the motor faster and use the same amount of power? To wit, the Tundra motor can spin up to 20,000 rpm. But the Lexus team (led by 40-year Toyota/Lexus veteran Kenji Arai) limited the AE86 BEV version’s motor speed to just 6,000 rpm. This means you have to shift gears, which, you know, is fun!

The team also introduced a fake idle by spinning and stopping the motor quickly while the transmission is in neutral. Better still, there are speakers just behind and below the driver’s rump that pump in the sweet sounds of the 4A-GEC motor. Arai’s team recorded every single rpm the old engine made up to 6,000 rpm, and that gets synched up to the Tundra motor. The results are an electric vehicle you know when to shift by using your ears. Or at least that’s the theory. We appreciated how the Lexus people approached the entire project, both seriously from an engineering perspective but also with a slight wink in their eyes. Like we do with our MotorTrend show, “The InEVitable,” the “EV” part of “Levin” is emphasized, in this case highlighted green. We especially love the back of the car which reads, “Non Cam 0.” The 0 indicates zero valves.

The Driving Experience

Cue that one Blur song, woohoo! While we found the actual 1995 Corolla GTS surprisingly torquey, the AE86 BEV rips. Clutching out drops the hammer, and the little EV bolts forward like it’s getting smacked in the rear. With a hammer. Or maybe a shovel. It just jumps ahead. There’s also nothing delicate about the way the AE86 likes to be shifted. Remember, it’s a modern six-speed, so slam it! At least that’s what we did. At one point after (allegedly, officer) just beating a red light to keep up with our photo/video car, we glanced over at the poor Japanese engineer who had to ride around with us, and he was smiling. As weird as this might sound, the driving experience reminds you of a miniaturized Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 with a manual and its 650 lb-ft of twist. That’s a car where each gear change is simply a gut punch of torque.

Of note is the fact the AE86 BEV concept is right-hand drive, so you use your left hand to shift. Always a treat in L.A. traffic. We should also point out how gloriously small and low to the ground both of the ’80s-era Toyotas we drove are. Yeah, sure, cars are safer today and do a bunch more stuff, but can we seriously say they drive better? A topic for another day, but something to think about. Back to it, even though we were limited by not being able to take the AE86 BEV on the freeway and were stuck in the downtown grid, we could have ripped the little EV around all day. Oh wait, no, we could not.

The downside here is the relatively tiny 18.1-kWh battery is only good for around 60 miles of range. That’s nothing. In fact, that sort of range barely works in an NEV (neighborhood electric vehicle). Fast charging would help a little, but due to the difference between Japan and the U.S.’s electric infrastructure, the battery can’t be charged on our chargers. Lexus had to drag the not-that-fast JDM version around with it. It is possible to hot swap the battery, and we were shown a video where the engineering team used a small engine hoist (the battery weighs more than 250 pounds) to pull out one battery and put in a fresh one, but the process takes about 40 minutes.

Why Did Lexus Do This to a Toyota?

The AE86 BEV Concept is two years old, arriving at the 2023 Tokyo Motor Show. Built to celebrate the 40-year anniversary of the legend that is the OG hot-rod Corolla, the real question is why bother? Why spend so much time and effort engineering something that no division of Toyota could ever sell to the public? Forget about the safety concerns, look at that range. Well, and we were told the AE86 BEV Concept was built to gauge interest. If the 13 years since we named the Tesla Model S the MotorTrend Car of the Year taught us anything, it’s that EVs work great as sedans, SUVs, and trucks. Essentially, they work as anything that’s routinely used to haul around people and stuff.

The final EV frontier has been vehicles aimed at true car and driving enthusiasts. Sports cars, really. Yes, 5,000-pound electric hypercars can beat or set almost every performance metric extant, but they simply do not resonate with enthusiasts. Porsche hasn’t even released the electric 718 Boxster/Cayman yet—and it very well might be totally fantastic—but the company already decided to backtrack and offer a gas-engine version, as well. Ferrari just announced the damn interesting tech that will underpin its first EV, and the internet is on fire. And not in a good way.

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So what’s Lexus doing? Reading the room? Thinking it’s found a better way? Because there’s nothing stopping Lexus from building a modern version of this concept, save for a business plan. Technology-wise, it’s solved. Well, it’s mostly solved. We just need some lighter batteries, possibly the solid-state stuff ToMoCo is working feverishly on.

Imagine if you will a front-mounted electric motor good for Camaro ZL1 levels of power; let’s round it up to 700 hp and 650 lb-ft of torque. Hey, it’s an EV. Let’s go with 750 lb-ft of torque. Put a six-speed manual between that motor and your limbs, shoot the resulting power to the rear wheels while keeping the weight down as much as possible, and boy, Toyota/Lexus would really have something on their hands. As the entire Lexus team repeatedly told us, it’s just gauging reactions of people who drive the AE86 BEV Concept. To that we say, “Toyota/Lexus, build it and they will come.” And so will we.