Remember the popular egg-shaped Toyota minivan from the ’90s? It turns out there was more to this model than a weird style. Here’s what made it special.
Minivans have always been cool to a certain subset of automotive culture, but to the average “Fast and Furious” fan or connoisseur of American muscle and JDM cars, minivans are still unfortunately synonymous with boring suburban mundanity even more so than any number of crossovers and SUVs. Minivans, to many, are unexciting and a convenient scapegoat for everything one may perceive as wrong about cars. But that is an unfortunate misrepresentation at best, and worst, flat-out wrong. The Toyota Previa is a perfect example.
On the outside, the Previa looks like an egg from space and the front looks very similar to the back. And yet the stylish design, if one could call it that, betrays the fact that the humble Previa minivan is more mechanically similar to a supercar, at least in layout, than just about any other minivan that came before or after.
The Previa is a mid-engine rear-wheel drive car, making it closer to a C8 Corvette than a Toyota Sienna or Honda Odyssey. Most minivans (with the exception of the Chevy Astro/GMC Safari and a scant few others) have the engine in the front, which is connected to a transaxle that drives the front wheels. In a Previa, the driver is literally sitting on top of the engine. The hood is a small access panel directly under the driver’s seat.
