Toyota, Acura using ‘Initial D’-type animes to market new cars

The Japanese automakers are targeting a new niche and embracing the street-racing crowd with their new ads

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Toyota and Acura are turning to anime – a niche form of Japanese animation – to market their new performance-oriented vehicles, presumably to the street-racing and enthusiast crowd that grew up on the Initial D TV series.

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Don’t call it a cartoon—the 26-episode program (which started life as a manga book series) was hugely influential both inside its native Japan and abroad, and helped cement the Toyota AE86 Trueno, or hachi-roku , as a drift icon. That compact car’s cult following is in fact why the automaker named its new sports coupe “GR 86.”

It’s also why Toyota tapped Initial D ‘s original animator, Shuichi Shigeno, to produce a new series of video shorts advertising said GT86, along with real-life “Drift King” Keiichi Tsuchiya.

The three 15-second ads star both the new GR 86, with Tsuchiya at the wheel; and Initial D ‘s panda-liveried Trueno and its driver, Takumi. They also tie in Toyota’s “FasterClass” pro drift driving schools.

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The ads, besides being downright awesome, mark a stark turn for the automaker’s marketing department, which as recently as 2019 justified its absence from video game franchises like Need for Speed: Heat with a desire to not “promote illegal street racing.”

By odd coincidence, just weeks after the Toyota- Initial D vids went live, Acura released its own animated 16-second video , though the short clip was just a teaser for a longer four-episode miniseries, Type S: Chiaki’s Journey , which began streaming today, January 20.

The company’s footing the bill for this new serial, and even the trailer demonstrates it’s not afraid to cram as much product placement as it can into the thing.

For example, in the span of just those 16 seconds, we see protagonist Chiaki will pilot both an Integra Type R and a new NSX Type S, the latter apparently around the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach circuit. The animation-style pretty clearly takes aesthetic inspiration from Initial D .

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Above you’ll find the minute-long Volume 1, but Volumes 2 through 4 are already live as well, so you can polish off the entire series’ narrative arc during your lunch break. We won’t spoil it for you, but we will say it does make us hope even more automakers jump in on this trend.