{"id":8200,"date":"2026-05-11T11:41:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T15:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=8200"},"modified":"2026-05-11T11:52:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T15:52:43","slug":"toyota-built-a-car-to-take-on-the-bmw-m5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/toyota-built-a-car-to-take-on-the-bmw-m5\/","title":{"rendered":"Toyota Once Produced a Car to Take On the BMW M5. Customers Loved It. Then Toyota Killed It"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I tell you to picture an imported rear-wheel drive sports sedan with a 2.8-liter inline-six engine, and disk brakes on all four wheels as standard, you\u2019re probably going to think of a classic BMW M5<\/a>. But Toyota actually brought something very similar to the American market in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

The Toyota Cressida was the Japanese carmaker\u2019s attempt to take on BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. It made 156 horsepower (which was very good for the time) while also getting a combined 19 miles per gallon from its fuel tank.<\/p>\n

Yes, the E28 generation M5 was more powerful, pumping out over 280 horsepower courtesy of an engine BMW yanked straight from an M1, but the Toyota offered a similar experience for less than half the price of its German rival.<\/p>\n

And, like the M5, it was a very practical sedan underneath it all. You could pop a spouse in the passenger seat, easily fit three kids in the back, and fill the trunk with a week\u2019s worth of groceries that probably only cost $10 in total because people in the 1980s didn\u2019t live in a dystopian hellhole like we all do.<\/p>\n

People who owned the Cressida absolutely loved it too. According to Kelley Blue Book<\/a>, the 1992 Toyota Cressida has an owner satisfaction rating of 4.7\/5 with one owner praising the reliability and claiming to have taken their 1990 Cressida to 356,000 miles with its original engine and transmission in place.<\/p>\n

Contrast that with the Toyota RAV4, the current best selling vehicle in the US and the SUV pretty much everyone will tell you to buy if you just want a practical, reliable, reasonably priced, vehicle. The 2025 RAV4 has an owner satisfaction of 3.6, while the 2026 model is even worse with a satisfaction rating of two.<\/p>\n

Sales were also solid, over 300,000 Cressidas were sold on US soil, with figures hitting over 45,000 in 1985, its debut year, and 42,180 in 1986. Toyota seemingly sold every Cressida that hit a US dealership, but still phased out its successful performance SUV. The final edition was rocking a larger 3.0-liter I6 and managed to up the horsepower to 190. Sales officially ended for the Toyota Cressida in 1993 when the final 322 units left the dealer\u2019s lot.<\/p>\n

So if it was desirable, well regarded, practical, and fun. If Toyota couldn\u2019t sell enough of them. What went wrong? Why did it end its days looking like another Toyota Crown?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Toyota Cressida was killed by tariffs, sort of<\/h2>\n
\"A
Credit: Toyota<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You know the reason we can\u2019t have cheap Chinese EVs over here? And how German luxury cars have shot up in price since the current administration decided random tariffs were the best trade policy we could adopt? The same sort of thing, albeit a more diplomatic version, killed off the Toyota Cressida.<\/p>\n

Ronald Reagan can be blamed for a lot of things, and you\u2019re free to add Cressida’s withdrawal from the US to that list. The US president at the time negotiated a deal with Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki, limiting the number of Japanese vehicles that could be exported and sold in the US every year. Each company had its own allocation based on sales in 1979\/1980, and the launch of Lexus in the US left Toyota with a choice to make.<\/p>\n

While Cressida sales had dipped a little since 1986, 1989 was a very good year for the performance sedan. 23,934 of the vehicles were sold, beating both 1987 and 1988. But 1989 was also the year the Lexus LS launched, and Toyota wanted to bring its luxury sedan to US shores. Imports of the Cressida fell off a cliff as Lexus took up more and more of the bandwidth, and the popular sports SUV eventually died with a whimper, not a bang.<\/p>\n

The decision, in a boardroom sense, is a bit of a no brainer. Profit margins on luxury vehicles are significantly higher than they are on sports sedans, with the latter being a bit of a niche. While OEMs do pursue the occasional passion project, making money is always going to be more important to them than a segment of their customer base having fun. So the Cressida got the chop, Lexus got its debut in the US, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n

By the time the restrictions lifted in 1994, Toyota had already moved past the Cressida. But the four-door vehicle does represent a bit of a high point in the company\u2019s history for many.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the moral of this story? It\u2019s probably something to do with the fact we can\u2019t have nice things. So those of you eyeing up cheap Chinese vehicles should take note. Even if the US Government pulls a massive U-Turn and negotiates some kind of trade deal with China, imports will be capped as they are in Canada<\/a>. And Chinese EV manufacturers probably aren\u2019t going to waste a lot of their allocation shipping a near-break-even $15,000 EV to US shores. Not when they have more expensive vehicles with James Bond on their billboards<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I tell you to picture an imported rear-wheel drive sports sedan with a 2.8-liter inline-six engine, and disk brakes … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8202,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-8200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performance-and-luxury","tag-toyota","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8200"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8209,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8200\/revisions\/8209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}