Toyota Demos Initial D's Drifting Without Spilling Water Cup in Real Life
Toyota partnered with popular street racing manga and anime series Initial D on Friday to recreate an iconic Initial D drifting scene in a video. Toyota driver Keizō Katō steers an AE86 Corolla Levin (incidentally the sister car to the AE86 Sprinter Trueno) on a company test course without spilling a cup of water, just like Initial D protagonist Takumi Fujiwara. The video features several SFX and panels from the Initial D manga series.
The Toyota x Initial D partnership celebrates the unofficial Tofu Day on October 2. (The day is a Japanese wordplay on the number 10, sometimes pronounced tō, and the number two, sometimes pronounced fu.)
Shūichi Shigeno launched the original Initial D manga in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine in 1995, and it spawned several anime series between 1998 and 2014. Shigeno published a sequel series, MF Ghost, in Young Magazine from 2017 to 2025, and it also inspired an anime series in 2023. The MF Ghost anime's staff announced the fourth and final season this past March.
By the way, if you don't have an actual AE86, you can get a scale miniature dashboard (with a cup, of course) as a consolation prize. Or you can also drift toy RC cars — or drift U.S. Marines tanks (in snow).
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.