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This first-gen Toyota Celica is one mean mother

Brian Karasawa's gen-one Toyota Celica is, in a word, badass. As a long-standing fan of the marque, the doting owner has tried to both restore and improve his Celica keeping period-correct modifications in mind. The 20R/22R mashup engine is outputting roughly 185 horsepower and graced with a lot of JDM-specific parts and modifications. Clearly, the exhaust has been upgraded from stock, as clips of the orange Toyota in motion are accompanied by one hell of a nice sound.
Tastes clearly vary, and there's not as much love for the first-wave of Japanese metal as there is for similar era American-iron, but we're pleased to see these cars finally getting more time in the spotlight. Scroll down below to see why we're stoked, and consider cruising your local Craigslist for late 1970s and early 1980s Japanese coolness (before we get there first).

Toyota says no one wants a Toyota electric car

It's no secret that Toyota doesn't really have a heart in pushing pure electric vehicles. The very limited Scion iQ EV project was killed before it went very far and the RAV4 EV project with Tesla was always only meant to produce just 2,600 units, but it didn't even get that far. In short, by all public appearances, Toyota just doesn't see the value of a pure EV. "No one is coming to our door asking us to build a new electric car." – Toyota's Craig Scott Toyota's public reasoning for the lack of a Prius C EV, for example, has often been that customers don't want to compromise on range and that hydrogen is a better bet. Company executives like Bob Carter say so over and over again. A new comment by Craig Scott, Toyota's national manager of advanced technologies, says that the Japanese automaker, give a slightly different spin on things. "Toyota actually favors fuel cells over other zero-emission vehicles, like pure battery electric vehicles," he told the Los Angeles Times. "We would like to be still selling cars when there's no more gas. And no one is coming to our door asking us to build a new electric car." This, understandably, has riled up a lot of EV supporters, many of whom have called on all automakers to sell more electric vehicles. After all, if Nissan can sell around 3,000 EVs a month in the US, couldn't Toyota do something similar? Are there thousands of people coming to the door asking for the fuel cell sedan that Toyota will start selling in the US next year? That answer is unclear, but it certainly doesn't look like Toyota is backing off its H2 bet any time soon.

Toyota teams with FirstElement Fuel on 19 hydrogen stations in California

Cross Toyota with a former General Motors and Hyundai executive and you might just get some real momentum when it comes to hydrogen refueling station deployment. Toyota and FirstElement Fuel Inc., which is headed by ex-GM and Hyundai executive Joel Ewanick, are working together on a project designed to complement California's agreement to spend about $200 million building 100 stations in the state. And while Toyota didn't put out any specific numbers, Automotive News reports that FirstElement received a $27.6 million grant from the California Energy Commission to build 19 stations, which will be sited at existing fueling spots and spaced far enough apart to be reachable by anyone within the state. In all, California has granted $47 million for the deployment of 28 new stations. Additionally, Toyota will get Linde to build a refueling station on a Toyota-owned property in the San Francisco Bay Area's San Ramon, Calif. Toyota, which is targeting a full-tank range of 300 miles and a five-minute refueling time for its fuel-cell sedan, had its fuel-cell prototype make its North American debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The company said at the time that 68 stations could serve 10,000 hydrogen vehicles. And while that station number doesn't sound terribly high, consider that there are fewer than 10 hydrogen refueling stations in California now. Check out Toyota's press release below and Autoblog's impressions from a drive of one of Toyota's fuel-cell prototypes late last year here. Toyota Collaborates with FirstElement, Providing Financial Assistance to Facilitate a Hydrogen Refueling Network in Targeted California Locations Toyota also will collaborate with hydrogen provider Linde, which will build a public hydrogen refueling facility at the Toyota San Francisco Regional Office May 01, 2014 TORRANCE, Calif. (May 1, 2014) – "The issue of hydrogen refueling infrastructure is not so much about how many stations; but rather, location, location, location," stated Bob Carter, senior vice president, Automotive Operations, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. (TMS), just four months ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where he unveiled a hydrogen fuel cell sedan due to launch in 2015. "Solutions are being found through collaboration between government, academia, carmakers and energy providers.