This Absolutely Roached 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo Costs Damn Near What A New Supra Does

Basketcase Supra Topshot
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Buying bad examples of good cars is entertaining, right? Sure, it costs wheelbarrows of money and hours of your life to set them right, but it makes for a good story. Well friends, sometimes the stories just aren’t worth the headaches along the way. Case in point: This might be the worst low-mileage Supra Turbo in America. It’s been repatriated from Nigeria and suffered massive amounts of neglect at some point in its 30-year life. It also just finished running on online auction platform Cars & Bids, and wow, it’s rougher than you’d ever imagine.

Supra Turbo Core Support

Any missing body panel usually isn’t a good sign, especially when it’s low down on the car. Take the chin spoiler that’s absent on this Supra. Normally, when part of a car’s face is ripped off,  it’s a sure sign of hidden damage, and would you look at that? The core support looks like a Twizzler.

Supra Turbo Headlight

There’s more damage worth noting. The front bumper is cracked, spiderwebbed, and not from a U.S. car, the taillights appear to somehow be delaminating, the right headlight is messed up, there are scratches all over the car, and the seller notes rust on the roof, in the spare tire well, and under the car. Trying to find a single panel on this Supra without damage is a difficult task. Oh, and that’s before we get into the litany of issues the seller claims the car has.

Supra Turbo Tire

The rear tires predate Death Grips’ debut studio album and one of the left rear sidewalls looks like the surface of a dry lake bed, so it probably isn’t safe to drive on. The driver’s power seat backrest switch is reportedly missing, but that’s not as pressing as the illuminated check engine, traction control, and ‘!’ lights in the gauge cluster. The right headlight is reportedly inoperable, as is the air-con, as is the radio. Many of these issues wouldn’t be acceptable on a $1,500 Corolla, let alone Toyota’s flagship.

Supra Turbo Rear Floor

The price of this incredibly neglected Supra? More than $49,750, as the reserve on the auction wasn’t met. While this is a genuine turbo car with a purported 63,500 miles on the clock and a clean CarFax, sometimes a car is so bad that the price tag just isn’t worth it. You could buy a well-built GE-T car for this sort of money, or jump in an equally-speculative pool and get into the air-cooled Porsche market for around $50,000.

Supra Turbo Rear

There’s nothing wrong with having a Mk4 Toyota Supra as a dream car. After all, it’s an iconic grand tourer that’s still quick today. However, this particular Supra is probably one to pass on. The small fortune it would take to bring this thing back to a presentable condition could easily be spent on a better example, and while buying terrible cars makes for great content, it certainly isn’t recommended for the average person.

(Photo credits: Cars & Bids)

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58 thoughts on “This Absolutely Roached 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo Costs Damn Near What A New Supra Does”

  3. How the hell does a car that came from Nigeria have a clean Carfax?

    The CBC found a stolen car from Ontario in Nigeria being driven by a government official THAT STILL HAD THE ONTARIO PLATES!

    Carfax is a joke.

  4. As someone who goes to Lagos often, this is one of the least clapped out cars that I have seen from there.
    The general state of cars there is something to behold, I often think how are these things holding together. Does not help that 90% of the roads are completely and utterly knackered

  6. The price makes sense when you realize the dealer is going to use the proceeds to pay the processing fees needed to release the funds in Murtala Muhammed’s abandoned Swiss bank account and then split them with whoever buys the car, in the amount of $10 million (ten million United States dollars)

  8. This level of abuse doesnt surprise me.
    There’s a story somewhere on the internet of a French couple’s trip across the Democratic replublic of congo. Even driving carefully there were places they had to abuse the hell out of their landcruiser.Some of the situations we could all imagine but others were bizarre. At one point they were driving a road that was erroded 8 feet below the surrounding area,and worse, it was deeper one side meaning they were scraping the bodywork for miles on end. I actually started to get PTSD reading about their problems.

    Anyways ,while on that trip this guy got talking to someone from an NGO who told him their new 4WD vehicles are completely shot inside two years.It’s pretty much normal in many parts of africa

    2. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to an Australian guy who travelled around the world with his wife and child on a BMW sidecar rig, and hearing about some of the insane (to me) stuff they went through was enough to get my heart rate up. For example: an accident where they flipped the rig led to snapped cylinder head studs. The solution? Pull off the cylinder head and epoxy the ends of the studs back together until they could get new ones several months down the line.

      A level of self-assuredness and competency I would love to have.

  10. Just…….no. Unless doing it for views. In which case I fully support diving into this money pit to transform it into something wild. Like a EV. Sell the engine and make it the wildest Toyosla GRoadster out there. Then revel in the wailing and gnashing of JDM fanboi teeth for putting the rattiest Supra Turbo under the Sawzall to make it awesome once again.

  13. I graduated high school in 2008, and for years at that point had been a car nut. I will never forget an article Car And Driver ran in the July ‘08 issue detailing the best used enthusiast cars available for $20k or less. The Toyota Supra Turbo was on that list, and the one they had was pretty ratty. Much worse than the ‘04 GTO or the E46 M3 they also tested in the article. I found it humorous that a Supra, then a 10+ year old car, was still worth $20k.

    How naive I was.

  14. There might be one way this would make sense. Wouldn’t the worst turbo Supra in the world selling for 50 grand increase the value of all turbo Supras? It might actually be financially beneficial to drop 50 grand on this if you already have a Supra collection, just to set the precedent. Also, if you already have a Supra collection, you probably already have plenty of spares to help get this one right. It’s a very specific case, sure, but you know they’re out there. I once read about a Jeep freak that went around buying every Grand Cherokee spare tire carrier he could find for way too much. I bet there are a lot of Supra freaks out there that have to have every car they come across, too. Also, I could just be very wrong and there’s no way buying this wouldn’t be stupid.

    1. I’m resisting being the undercover supra longroof freak and buying every is300 wagon I come across… Mine’s virtually perfect other than where a retread hit the front bumper leaving a few surface scratches, and I have enough spare parts to build half of another almost…

      But… Worst project car I’ve ever purchased. Bought it sight unseen 1000 miles away and got it delivered while I was out of town. Got it priced where the sedans were selling 4 years ago, and the seller couldn’t confirm whether or not it had any rust underneath, etc. It shows up, I look underneath, and your typical 1 year old car is generally rustier than this. Call back the owner and he says “oh, I never drove it in the winter, I always took my jeep, and the original owner was the same way, he only used his land cruiser in the winter”… Next problem is 4 years in NOTHING HAS BROKEN! WORST PROJECT CAR EVAR! I have a spare engine, 6 speed, ECU, LSD,… all sitting around waiting for you to break just one single thing that keeps me from being able to drive you, but you’re too nice stock to just take apart needlessly for 3 months!

  16. People get a little flustered sometimes when I say JDM bros are out of their goddamn minds and need to chill out but this right here is exactly why. Dropping $50,000 on one of the worst turbo Supras out there is lunacy. I’d say whoever didn’t get it can go use that money on a new Civic Type R but good luck finding one of those for a mere $5,000 over MSRP.

    Seriously y’all. Take a deep breath. The clout is not worth putting yourself in a precarious financial situation. If you simply MUST HAVE the craziest, most Instagram worthy Japanese car you can 50 grand is within striking distance of a used GTR or LC500. They’ll serve you much better than a Tracy spec Supra from Nigeria will…

    1. This is like the perfect storm of gullible Mk4 Supra fans and inflated auction-price shenaniganery.

      If the owner was responsible, they’d hack it up and lift it for the Gambler 500, not try to shake down some gullible weeb for way more than it’s worth.

      1. This! We have a 95 SC300 with the 2JZGE that is now awaiting a turbo, and a daily driven 98 SC400 with the ultra reliable 1UZFE V8. They are just a more luxury, slightly extended length Supra and they sell for peanuts.

  17. I know it’s a Mk4 Supra, but man, Cars & Bids should be ashamed to have listed this, unless it was intended to generate traffic. I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t meet minimum standards for BaT.

  21. Fast and the Furious 2023 edition:

    Dom: “You owe me a 10 second car.”
    Brian: “Ok, but what about a single family home out in Anaheim? It’d be way cheaper for me. I’m only an undercover cop!”

  23. This is the definition of polishing a turd. That paint is fairly fresh and they just went ahead and sprayed the wheels the same color. Other than paint, there looks to be zero investment in it. This is a true money pit unless you are going to do a complete restoration in which case, it’s priced way to high for that investment.

  24. Oh man, I wasn’t expecting to see a Death Grips reference on the autopian today. But yeah, this thing is rough.

    One of the comments has a link to the Supra registry that has quite a few pics of it’s time in Nigeria. At one point, it was light blue with some diamond stitched seats and didn’t look too terrible. Then it got rougher and was converted to a big single turbo at some point. There’s even a pic of the Nigerian equivalent of a title which is amusing because all of the info is just handwritten in.

  25. I make a lot of questionable investments, but I would love to meet the person who thinks this car is worth $50k. You can’t be too hard on them though, there is at least one person out there with even more questionable judgment – the person who wouldn’t sell it!

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