Pristine 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo Sells for $122,500 at RM Sotheby’s Amelia Island Auction
Believe it or not, that means the six-figure Supra market is finally cooling off.
Try to divorce yourself from the twenty-five year nostalgia cycle that currently has us all reliving the 1990s and distill this to a single question: If someone back then had told you that this weird Toyota would be worth over $120,000 one day in the not too distant future, would you have believed them? Probably not—so don't beat yourself up over missing the chance to hoard a few A80s and cash in like the owner of this 10K-mile 1993 Toyota Supra that just sold for $122,500 at RM Sotheby's Amelia Island auction in Florida.
That's an eyebrow-raising figure, no doubt. And yet it also represents a slight cooling of the insane auction house market the A80 Supra has enjoyed over the last few years. A similar 1994 model with almost identical miles went for over $173,000 at Amelia Island last March, the main difference being a tan interior on that car. Worth the premium, in my opinion. A run-up of low-$100K auction results preceding that sale made it seem like the Supra was destined for truly unobtainable territory, but now the flirtation with $200K is looking more like an outlier.
So it'll settle for merely unobtainable, then. For $122,500, the unnamed buyer of this model got a launch-year 1993 Supra with a six-speed manual transmission, the preferred twin-turbo 2JZ-GTE inline six with its hearty cast iron block, and the targa roof. The one-owner car reportedly spent its entire life in the mostly-dry climes of Colorado and remains in impeccable shape inside and out, somehow covering only 9,897 miles since new with nary a single modification.
This generation of the Supra is now prized as a temple of modern analog performance for its engaging handling and uncomplicated manners, and we can only hope this one doesn't spend the rest of its live in a plastic bubble.
There is a bit of angst watching all this, because that sum still makes it one of those cars that's been beamed out of Craigslist and Facebook ads to live in the collector marketplace, and there's no bringing it back down to Earth. Like any collector car, Toyota's iconic sports coupe was pulled into that realm by cultural forces that are more complex than can be distilled in a single story. But an undeniably large part of it is the Supra's image as a representation of everything people love and miss about the 1990s. The fourth generation arrived at a moment where everything—the business structures, the corporate will, the technology, the consumer demands—were geared towards building this kind of purist machine.
But it's impossible to recreate that primordial soup, which is why it's less likely that you'll see the 2020 Toyota Supra pulling six figures at auction in 2045. The A80 Supra is the real deal, and it'll hold its market value accordingly.
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