You have to hand it to Toyota. When they start thinking outside the box, they can really let their creativity run wild. It doesn’t happen too often – they’re no Citroën or Lancia – but once in a while, they have come up with daring and unexpected designs, like the Sera, the Origin, the Sports 800, the Kujira Crown or the Previa. For the WiLL cars, they cranked the weird factor up to 11.
It’s all pretty skin-deep, though. Underneath its Baroque exterior, the platform is that of the plain vanilla Toyota Vitz (a.k.a Yaris in overseas markets). Toyota knew to be creative only in certain areas, not everywhere all at once. But it might be best to start the story from the beginning. Shall we do that? Yes, we WiLL.
In the late ‘90s, corporate Japan was busy trying to get out of a pervasive funk that had taken hold of the national economy since 1992, when the economic bubble went pop. One brainwave the C-suites had was to broaden their products’ appeal to the younger generations, i.e. Gen-Xers and the coming Millennials. What with that new-fangled invention called Internet, decision-makers at Nippon Corp. figured a novel approach might be called for (dot com).
Bigwigs from brewer Asahi, sugary foodstuff maker Glico, travel agent Kinki, electronics and white goods giant Panasonic, beauty and hygiene product manufacturer Kao, stationary firm Kokuyo and carmaker Toyota got together and decided to launch the WiLL brand, dedicated to this younger target demographic. These corporate guys (I can almost guarantee they were all male) figured a wide variety of products, from packaged holidays to washing machines, could be sold under the same umbrella organization if said organization’s branding was deemed hip and groovy enough, as the kids say.
The plan was implemented in 1998, and Toyota wasted no time, displaying the quirky WiLL Vi four-door saloon at the 33rd Tokyo Motor Show in October 1999. Sales began in January 2000, but despite the savvy ad campaigns, the innovative design and the WiLL branding, results were on the underwhelming side. While the car did reach its younger female target demographic, Toyota figured that they had ventured a little too far into oddity with the WiLL Vi. After just under 17,000 were made, the car was nixed in December 2001.
A larger Corolla-based model called WiLL VS was added to the range in April 2001, aimed at men in their 30s. But Toyota wanted the WiLL brand to take another crack at the small car market.
Thus the WiLL Cypha was born in October 2002, on the same platform as the WiLL Vi, but with a slightly less polarizing design. They did go for a far more varied (and vivid!) colour palette, which would hopefully help broaden the car’s appeal to both genders.
Under its bulbous bonnet, the WiLL Cypha only had one engine option, at least initially: a 1.3 litre DOHC 4-cyl. good for 88hp and necessarily mated to a 4-speed automatic. I guess Toyota figured younger Japanese folks weren’t manually-inclined. In early 2004, a 4WD variant was added to the range, featuring a 106hp 1.5 litre engine.
“Cypha” is an alleged portmanteau of “cyber” and, for some reason, “phaeton.” The phaeton aspect is not entirely evident, but cyber-wise, the little WiLL vehicle did present some interesting innovations, mostly to do with how it was sold.
Toyota sold the WiLL Cypha at their Vista Store dealerships, but they also leased them through a scheme they called P-Way. This consisted in a basic leasing fee plus a mileage fee calculated by remotely accessing the car’s G-Book telematics terminal. For a 2002 hatchback, that was pretty advanced stuff. And it worked well, too: Toyota figured about 5% of WiLL Cypha owners would opt for it, but the figure was actually closer to 15%.
The main downside was the car’s price, which was over ¥1.5m – a lot of coin for a Yaris, not matter how colourful and individualistic the wrapper was.
Turns out, this was an issue with the whole WiLL brand, really. A few well-off youngsters might fall for the sleek ads and think the square orange logo meant something, but the overwhelming majority of the tech-savvy target audience saw this exercise as either cynical pandering or just plain nonsense. Which it arguably was.
Because of licensing laws, participation in the WiLL brand was limited to one company per industrial sector. This led some corporations to join the scheme to ensure that their competitors could not, though they also regarded the whole thing as dubious. By 2003, as sales results in all WiLL products showed poor numbers, enthusiasm in the idea was waning and the whole WiLL scheme started to fizzle out.
The Cypha’s sales were taken up by the Netz dealership network, which absorbed Vista in 2004. The car carried on until August 2005 as the last WiLL-branded product sold by Toyota. With just under 32,000 units made, the Cypha was the most popular WiLL model by far – a drop in the ocean, as far as Japan’s number one carmaker was concerned. At least, it was a particularly noticeable and curious drop, with bright pop colours and strange stacked headlights.
Related posts:
CC Capsule: Toyota Will Cypha – Putting The Toy In Toyota, by RiveraNotario
Curbside Outtake: 2002-2005 WiLL Cypha – Toyota Tries To Look Young, by Roger Carr
Those lens across the lights and turn signals wouldn’t last long in America!!
I give it about a day in a Walmart parking lot!!
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It’s almost another take on the early FIAT Multipla aesthetic. Weirdly there’s a WiLL Vi for sale on one of the rougher used car lots here in Bodmin, been up for sale for years. Now sporting plenty of green lichen on the outside and a full mould and condensation interior, looks like an escapee from the Upside Down. Goodness knows how it got there.
Used car importers latched onto these WILL Toyotas there are plenty of them in NZ.
WiLL, that certainly got my attention.
Didn’t they have an interesting array of colours! Pastels on the earlier Vi (like the Nissan Pike cars), then very strong bold colours on the Cypha. One extreme to the other, rather like the styling going from flat and angled to overblown curvy. If one extreme doesn’t sell well enough, WiLL, let’s try the other.
“Cypha” always made me think of “cipher”; as in code, or “what the heck is that thing?” Kind of appropriate. I rather like it as an alternative bodystyle for the Yaris, but for a premium price I’d be looking for more actual substance, but that’s the same problem as the Nissan Pike cars: pedestrian mechanicals, no upgrades available. The style seemed to be the thing.
I know it’s been explained here before but – is it just me being different, or does the whole rationale behind the WiLL brand just make no sense? Combining so many wholly disparate products and services under a single brand just does not compute, to me. Were all these companies linked on some kind of conglomerate level, like a Korean chaebol? Maybe it’s one of those inscrutable Japanese things.
So it wasn’t a triumph of the Will ?
Toyota Will VS might be one of the Opel source of inspiration for the following Astras after the G, I can see some cues of Opel Astra H and J all mixed up in its style.