Rumours of a new Supra have been circulating for years with no comment from Toyota until this week. The GT 86 chief engineer Tetsuya Tada told Asia One, that Toyota President Akio Toyoda has asked him to “make a successor to the Supra as soon as possible.”

Toyota has reportedly green lighted two new sports cars, one will be positioned above the GT 86 and the other below. One is obviously Supra successor and the second is reportedly an MR-2 successor.

We can expect the new Supra and MR-2 earliest in 2017 as it will take at least five years to develop it according to Toyota’s chief engineer Tada.

The Detroit Bureau reports in related news, that the new Supra could be jointly-developed with Tesla, meaning the successor the Supra is an all-electric sports car.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed last week the company is already working on “a few other variants of the Model S”. One of them is reportedly something similar in size to BMW 3 Series.

Toyota and Tesla already have a product from their earlier partnership, which resulted in RAV4 EV.

Back in June, BMW and Toyota confirmed they will expand their existing collaboration to jointly develop a new sports car.

So it could be that Toyota is working with two different companies on two different models. One is the Supra successor and the other is MR-2 successor, developed in partnership with BMW.

Pictured is Toyota FT-HS Concept.