Here's the time that Toyota completely lost touch with the kids

Okay, so you’re a monolithic car corporation, but not down with today’s youth and sales figures are reflecting it. What do you do?

Hire an agency that knows what it's doing, instruct it to launch a witty, youth focussed ad campaign, and update your range with budget trim levels that come with options young people want as standard.

OR

Team up with some equally out-of-touch brands and launch a tidal onslaught of confusingly branded bespoke products, with no particular rhyme or reason, that may or may not interest the target audience.

Well, if you liked that second option, read on.

See, at the dawn of the new millennium Toyota launched WiLL. Oh, you’ve never heard of it? You’re about to find out why.

WiLL was a sub-brand designed to break into the minds of the youth by offering ‘stylish’ products. Specifically, they wanted to target under 23-year-old females. The result? This. I give you: 

The 2000 WiLL Vi

What went wrong here? Everything, apparently. Japan was big into retro-style at the time, but this Toyota Echo apparently fused with a Citroen 2CV is like some kind of nightmare come to life. It’s not quick, the mis-matching body panels make no sense, and the rear cutaway window eats any semblance of practicality. Apparently, the dash is - I shit you not - inspired by a baguette.

It must be cheap then, right? Wrong. You’ve gotta pay for ‘style’, young person. The car cost, at the time, roughly AU$15,000, or $5,300 more than the Echo it was based on.

For some shocking reason, the Japanese youth weren’t for it, so after a short sales run, it was replaced by exhibit two:

The 2001 WiLL VS

I bet you were waiting for the nightmare to continue, like I was about to take you on some Pan’s Labrynth-esque dive into the well funded, lost souls of the early 2000s Toyota design department. Surprisingly though, this car looks super slick. Like, suspiciously slick. Like, as though they just regurgitated this shockingly modern design for the latest Corolla…

I’ll let you decide, but despite this car looking way better than the Vi it replaced, as well as being better equipped and more powerful with Corolla running gear, Toyota only ever produced 4000 of them. You’d think after some time this design would catch on. But no, only two years into it, Toyota had problems with WiLL, which doesn’t help to explain the next car.

The 2002 WiLL Cypha

It’s one step forward, two steps back for this poor brand/project. I mean, the Vi was bad, but at least it was retro-quaint. This ill-advised successor went for retro-future, and… well… are you starting to understand why WiLL didn’t take off?

Car and Driver’s Japanese correspondent said, of this car: “Americans aren’t ready for styling like this.” Understatement? No mate, nobody is ready for this styling.

The wacky, nonsensical youth-based sensory assault continues inside, where the dash is supposedly inspired by karaoke machines. (better than baguette I suppose...)

That’s not to say this car didn’t have some interesting, forward thinking features though. It had a rudimentary navigation & multimedia system, which would have been a significant standard addition at the time.

Importantly though, this car was available to purchase as a kind of subscriber agreement. You’d pay for the car monthly, but were able to trade it for either of the other two WiLL models on a whim. It’s kinda like today’s GoGet or tomorrow’s Lynk&Co. Maybe a little too interesting for the early 2000s though, and the project was discontinued in 2004.

But wait, that’s not quite all folks.

Remember when I said WiLL was a team-effort between Toyota and other brands? Here are some WiLL-branded highlights: Asahi WiLL Sweet Brown Beer, Panasonic WiLL KX-FKN110 fax machine, Kao WiLL air freshener, and something called WiLL ‘ice for relax’.

So, was it all a total waste of money and resources?

Not quite, Toyota considered WiLL as a design study for its next venture in the US. You may have heard of it – it was called Scion. We think Initial D has done more for the brand’s street cred, though.

What do you reckon? Should Toyota refrain from future mid-life crises? Tell us in the comments.