SEOUL, Jan. 21 (Yonhap) — Toyota Motor Corp. said Tuesday it has launched the GR Supra sports car in South Korea to help revive its lackluster sales amid trade tensions between Seoul and Tokyo.
The GR Supra comes with a 3.0-liter gasoline engine that can generate a maximum 340 horsepower and 51 kilogram-meters of torque. It is priced at 74 million won (US$63,000), Toyota Motor Korea said in a statement.
It is the first of four models scheduled to be released in the South Korean market in the first quarter of 2020. The three others are the Camry’s sports version XSE gasoline model and the all-wheel drive Prius and Prius C Crossover gasoline hybrid models, Toyota said.
The Japanese carmaker suffered a sharp decline in sales in Korea when boycott of Japanese products affected its sales beginning in July last year.
For the whole of 2019, Toyota sold 10,611 vehicles in South Korea, down 37 percent from 16,774 units a year earlier, according to the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association (KAIDA).
Other Japanese brands — Toyota’s luxury Lexus brand, Honda Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and its premium Infiniti brand — saw their overall sales drop 19 percent to 36,661 cars in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy last year from 45,253 in 2018, KAIDA said.
In July, Japan tightened regulations on exports to South Korea of three high-tech materials critical for the production of semiconductors and displays. In August, Japan officially removed South Korea from its list of countries given preferential treatment in trade procedures.
The Japanese moves are widely seen as retaliation against court rulings here that ordered Japanese firms to compensate South Korean victims of forced labor during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
kyongae.choi@yna.co.kr(END)