It's hard to think that sports cars were once a fundamentally experimental zone - something for people whose motoring pleasure was not complete unless they grazed their shins every time they changed up to third and who liked to emerge afterwards covered in oil and gravel.
A new generation of sports cars, many of them Japanese, has tamed the genre, almost to the extent that one wonders whether the word "sports" really applies any more, or whether it would be better replaced by "leisure". Owners of these models, one would hazard, are not much inclined to tinker with the engine at the weekend, but they do get them valeted on a regular basis. These cars cunningly combine the thrill of the open road with the comfort of the homely sofa. They're pushy, but they're also cute. They offer sports car ownership with none of the getting down and getting dirty.
Which is fine by an awful lot of people, to judge from the number of Mazdas and Toyotas one sees on the roads. Available in one derivative only, the new Toyota MR2 pitches itself right into the thick of this relatively bullish market. It's taken an envious look at the style and speed of the Porsche Boxster. And it's taken an equally envious look at the sales figures of the Rover MGF, whose price it undercuts. (You can still buy an MGF for a couple of hundred pounds less than a Toyota, but it will have a less powerful engine.)
As a rule of thumb, the closer the back of your neck is to the tarmac, the more authentic the sports car you are driving. In the Toyota, one sits pretty much upright, as in a slightly go-ahead estate car. In fact, I reckon you could just about walk into the MR2 without breaking stride. It's also possible to get out of the car without making tell-tale geriatric noises - a handy aspect given that a sizeable portion of the market for sports cars is men whose physical peak disappeared over the horizon at least a decade ago.
Depress the accelerator and the car doesn't exactly bolt you to your seat. Toyota say their engineers thought hard about the MR2's weight and they are able to boast that the car has the best power-to-weight ratio in its class. It does indeed slip neatly around corners, but it does so quietly and politely. If you stamp down on the pedals you can get something approximating to a boisterous roar out of it, but you have the impression that the 1.8-litre engine would rather, on the whole, that you didn't. Again, some will find this a drawback - or even a sell-out - while others, who don't necessarily wish to drive in a permanent state of white-knuckled frenzy, will respond more warmly.
In the English climate, even more than engine performance, ease of opening and closing your sports car's roof is the key consideration. It's something you're going to be doing a lot of, so you don't want to end up with some laughably optimistic mechanism that leaves you looking like someone haplessly trying to crush an umbrella into a waste basket. (Incidentally, like using a hand-held mobile phone, or eating Chinese food, roof removal is not something one ought to practice while actually in motion. And especially not on motorways, or on the slip-roads leading on to motorways.)
The Mercedes SLK has a fully-automatic roof that smoothly does its stuff above your head at the touch of a button. It's impossible to top this for a Bond-style roof removal experience (and working on an appropriately aloof facial expression to hold while the Mercedes' roof mechanism was in business remains one of the most enjoyable projects I have ever got involved with in a car). But the SLK also costs about three times as much as the MR2 and beggars can't be choosers, so with the Toyota you'll have to do the heavy work yourself.
To be fair, they've gone a long way towards lightening the burden. Blessedly, there are no poppers involved at any stage of the process. (Anything involving poppers and a piece of slightly rain-shrunken canvas is route one to hell. Go to a rally of Caterham owners: none of them has a full set of fingernails.) You spring the two mildly resistant clips above the windscreen and then hoist the roof behind you. Ideally, the roof would then settle entirely into the recess created for it, but I found I had to get out of the car to tuck the edges in.
Yes, I had to get out of the car . What was Toyota thinking of? At least closing the roof can be achieved entirely from within the vehicle, though, as I reached behind me for the handles and heaved, I tended to find myself assuming the less than dignified position of someone failing to perform a bench press, and MR2 owners on first dates might like to bear that possibility in mind.
After removing the roof it would have been nice to have been able to remove a couple of things from the MR2's interior, in particular the ugly Sony hi-fi that comes as standard and the inside door handles, which are tubular and intended to have a sporty aluminium appearance, but actually look like devices from an elderly person's bathroom. Even with those out of the way, there would be, of course, no room in the car for much other than you and a friend.
Dispense with the friend, though, and the car does hint at some practical applications. As part of my commitment to testing the vehicle in a broad variety of extreme urban settings, I took it to Sainsbury's, where I learned that actually the Toyota MR2 does function as a family shopping car, as long as you don't buy anything large and unpliable, such as boxes of cereal. Better, of course, to abandon such considerations, push the roof down and find some open road. But - with the MR2 - not too open.
The lowdown
Verdict: Sedate sports car
Price on the road: £18,495
0-62 mph: 7.9 seconds
Top speed: 130mph
Fuel consumption: urban, 27.9; extra urban 47.9; combined, 38.2
Max power: 140/6,400 bhp/rpm
Max torque: 170/4,400 Nm/rpm
Weight: 975kg
Length: 12ft 8in/3.88m
