Japan’s Secret V12: Better Than A Rolls-Royce?

This is the only V12 production car ever made in Japan, and when I first rode in this Toyota Century taxi in Tokyo, I realized an uncomfortable truth for the Euros. Toyota may actually build the most sophisticated luxury car in the world. Get ready for some soft-ass jazz and some hard-ass commentary. I'm James Reeves, you're watching Gym Ports. The Century was designed for Japanese executives, old money, Yakuza bosses, basically anyone important enough to be driven around in a limo-like sedan that wasn't loud in any sense of the word. Distinguished, luxurious, but on a jazz-kisa low key. When I rode in a new Century in Ginza, I knew eventually I was going to have to import one. The problem was, after I bought my incredible Toyota Crown Royal Saloon for 5,700 bucks, the need for another Japanese executive sedan wasn't exactly urgent, even if my wife basically stole the Crown from me. But my dad decided that he wanted to get a Crown too. Now, my dad's 88 years old, he's a Marine, a lawyer, not exactly the kind of guy who gets excited about much anymore, but after he rode in my Crown, he would not let go. Every week, asking whether we'd won an auction yet. We bid on Crowns for months. We never won one that met his standard. Then one day, a nice driver-grade Century with 115,000 kilometers on the clock shows up at auction in Japan. We won it on March 3rd, and it landed at the shop in Pensacola for baseline fluid swap and pickup on May 7th. My dad actually drove down to the shop to secretly look at it without telling anyone who he was. One of the mechanics apparently looked outside and said, who's the old guy walking around that Century? Oh, that's J.J. Reeves' dad. Jim's a tough dude, but he was acting like a six-year-old on Christmas morning over this car. Now, I'm not gonna tell you what I paid for it yet, because I don't wanna spoil the video. First, you need to understand what makes this car special. The Century has been made by Toyota since 1967. This is a 1997 model, the first year of the second generation of the car, made for 20 years until 2017. More importantly, this is the only Japanese production car ever sold with a V12. Because of the 25-year rule in the U.S., we can only import 1997 through some 2001 model year vehicles, so the second gen is almost unheard of here, but it's rare in Japan, too. In two decades, only 9,573 second-gen Centuries were made, less than 500 a year. It's not assembled on a normal production line. They are low-volume cars built by hand at Canto Auto Works, where fit and finish matter more than mass production. Senior craftsmen and their apprentices personally ensure the quality of Toyota's crown jewel. If you think this is Toyota trying to compete with Mercedes or Rolls-Royce, you're already misunderstanding this car. Toyota never built the Century for the rest of the world. Japan built the car for Japan. This is Toyota's flagship. This is the car that said, I'm a Roppongi baller, but in a hushed voice, not a shout. This has been the car for anyone who believes that showing off wealth too aggressively is in poor taste. That's why the Century looks the way it does, flat sides, minimal body lines. Visually, it's a shawl-collar tuxedo, not a Gucci tracksuit. It doesn't look fast, it doesn't look aggressive, but like a Swiss watch, it conveys quality to even those who have never seen one before. But you don't have to take my word for it. This is Aaron Ross, founder of Bulldog Auto Japan. Aaron is an exporter, broker, who lives in Tokyo and exports hundreds of JDM vehicles a year. Coincidentally, the man who got this Century for me. The Century is essentially like, maybe like a Japanese Rolls-Royce. It's a car to be driven in, not to be driven, for the most part. Not to drive. Yeah, so historically, you'd see a lot of Japanese businessmen, maybe some mafia types, big back seats, kind of a stretched type of sedan. They would have cloth seatings, and people would always wonder, why do they have cloth seats? And that's because leather seats were known to squeak and make more noise. The cloth was more quiet and seemed to be more luxurious. So they would have really, really nice cloth. Yeah, I mean, if you're a businessman, you don't want your side piece squeaking around on the leather seats while you're on a business call. Unsticking her legs, her miniskirt, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Dude, you just painted a picture. I totally see it. I'm sure it happens. When they come up at auction, they're already reliable vehicles. You can get really cool, super luxurious ones, and they're not very expensive. They're also always maintained quite well. You very rarely see one, unless it was like a company car that was running nonstop. They always have pretty low mileage and maintained quite well. When I was in Tokyo, I actually got to check out in bed on a first-generation Century from 1989. It wasn't nearly as new or as clean as this car, but back then, the first-gen Century already had bizarre executive luxury features that made it feel completely different from everything else from Europe. Power-tilting vent windows, rear seat audio controls, and a tape deck built into the armrest, and even a television mounted in the ceiling. We saw this 1989 Century that I thought was one of the coolest cars I've ever seen at auction. I wanna say it was like 60,000 miles or something super low mileage. This is one of the coolest f***ing cars literally ever. I feel like I should have like a bourbon and a cigar in here. Ooh, the biggest baller move that I have ever seen, it had the tape deck in the back, like in the console. So you've got a radio up front, but the guy in the back is the one putting the tapes in and hitting play right there in the center console. Total Time Warp vibe, they're super cool. That car sold for less than 10 grand. I bid about $8,000 for it and almost got away with it. It's kind of insane when you think about how much engineering and craftsmanship go into these cars. Even the branding tells you this isn't a normal Toyota. There are almost no Toyota badges anywhere on this car. Instead, you get the Phoenix emblem repeated throughout the hood, the wheels, the interior, the steering wheel. During my VIN inspection at the DMV, the inspector wasn't going to register this car as a Toyota at first because he couldn't find the word Toyota anywhere on the car. Fortunately, the expert paperwork bailed me out. This car was a little rough to the touch when it arrived, but that's kind of normal for a 30-year-old black car after a two-month voyage over the Pacific. I hit it with the orbital buffer, was removing contaminants that were turning my buffer bonnets gray, and the finish came back beautifully. Toyota didn't just make-o these cars with base-clear all-in-one paint jobs. The finishing process was inspired by traditional Japanese Urushi lacquerwork. It's a seven-step process that reportedly takes four craftsmen 40 hours to make this deep black that you look into, not at. This car is an enamel black Japanese scalpel cutting through traffic. I think the exterior's really cool, but the magic is inside the car. The Sentry's a great driver, but it's not built to be driven. It's built to be driven in. Sitting in the back seat, that will become instantly clear to you. Curtains right here, lacy curtains. Ashtray, all four corners. Like every door has a removable ashtray and the lighter, which is hilarious. Center console with a ton of controls for the seats. Cup holder. There's your AC vents. Pull this down. Remote control for the television. There's a television telebee. The base for the phone that's in the trunk. Storage there for probably cocaine. Then you have this. Check it out, guys. Haven't seen one of those, have you, in a long time? VHS player. You've got this kind of neato accordion-style storage box. Burled wood everywhere. I don't know what this is. I think it's just like additional sun visor. It's just, it doesn't seem like it supports a lot of weight. Just a little poofy flip-down thing. Check this out. The door handles are slick. One of the coolest things in this car, these burled wood door handles. Bear in mind, this car is almost 30 years old. Three decades old, still with factory GPS with front and rear touchscreens. Unfortunately, the maps are Japan only, so unless you're trying to find a sushi restaurant in Osaka circa 1999, it's pretty much useless. My favorite feature of this car is right here. Pull that down. Now you've got yourself a little ottoman. So you can sit down and stretch your legs all the way through to ride in absolute comfort. The center section of the front passenger seat folds forward into basically a chaise lounge so the rear passenger can stretch out. Perfect for a little Japanese man or my little American wife who unironically instructed me to blur her feet out because you guys are nasty. Rear glass has a deep tint and curtains for privacy including a power lace curtain for the rear windshield controlled by the driver. And like my crown, the backseat has a switchboard of a command center. You can adjust the heated and vibrating rear seats, control the audio system and the AC, even remotely move the front passenger seat forward to give yourself more leg room because only losers ride shotgun in Japan. There's also a functioning television and a VCR in the rear. There's a multi-disc CD changer in the glove box, a tape player, even cooler, a Toyota Century branded tape recorder back here. Amazing, you can dictate notes for your next speech at the Gundam Museum in Tokyo for your secretary pool to transcribe on Monday after you're done spending the entire weekend slamming highballs at hostess bars in Kabukicho. A remote control power deploys from the center console because manually reaching up to change the channel is for people who make a mere six figures a year. One thing I love slash hate about this particular Century is that it reeks of cigarette smoke. Like when you open the door, you get floored. It smells like a couch you bought from R.J. Reynolds Strip Club's yard sale. It tells a story. You can picture some Yakuza boss in 1998 chain-smoking seven-star cigarettes from the Konbini while watching bootleg VHS tapes of that new cowboy bebop show everyone's been talking about. Aside from the smell and a little bit of yellowing on the lace curtains, the interior is immaculate. You usually see cigarette ash burn some wear and tear in a smoker's car with 70,000 miles on it but this one looks almost new, which again speaks to how well these cars were made. And even though I said this isn't really a car built for driving, the engine is the centerpiece of the second generation Century. 1997 was the first year of the 1GZ engine, the only Japanese production V12 ever made. On paper, sounds a little underwhelming. Five liters, 12 cylinders, 276 horsepower, maybe. Japan's manufacturers had a gentleman's agreement in the 90s where they would not advertise their cars as having more than 276 horsepower to avoid constant one-upsmanship, which is funny because everyone was lying. But in the Century, Toyota was looking for silence, not speed. One of the first things you notice when you spend time in Japan is how quiet everything is. It's a virtue in this country. I remember walking around Tokyo for the first time, a city with more people than the entire state of California, and on my first day there, I didn't hear a single car horn. That culture shows up in this design. As a great example, soft-close doors and trunk. On the Century, you simply softly press the door or trunk lid shut, it'll do the rest for you because nothing breaks your concentration or worsens your sake headache like your driver slamming ---- around. One of the advantages of the V12 is that it's naturally balanced. It's two inline-six engines joined at a common crankshaft. There's almost no vibration, and because it fires more frequently than a six- or eight-cylinder engine, the power delivery feels completely uninterrupted and, of course, silent. Driving this car, it's quiet. In Japan, everything is structured around stuff being quiet. Shutting up, and this is a very quiet car. It handles like you're driving a cloud. It's like Sidney Sweeney turned me into a little thumb-sized man, put me inside her bosom, and I'm just riding around. I feel gentle rolls. I feel softened bumps. You feel the pavement. You're connected to it, but it's almost like you're hearing the pavement through earplugs, if that makes sense. If you want the person in the backseat to feel completely isolated from the mechanical world, your goal isn't fast and furious. It's soft and serious. To focus for the next presentation or to nap off a strong zero hangover without being disturbed. The car moves like a Pacific wave, gentle, smooth, but powerful. The 1GZ engine, massively overbuilt with conservative tuning and redundant systems. Rumor has it that this car can continue operating even if one entire bank of cylinders fails. That's the kind of durability that sets it apart from historically shitty European ultra luxury car brands and even makes my Land Cruiser jealous. The Century is a moving homage to Serenity, a basho haiku on wheels. Even though this car is built to move in silence, I was surprised at how much attention it gets in Florida. Probably more than my crown, but not quite Subaru's sandbar levels. People absolutely notice the Century roll by and you notice them noticing. You'll be driving across a three mile bridge at the speed limit with some Jeep with angry eyebrows going 20 over will suddenly slow down and pace you. Sometimes people pull out their phones, sometimes they just stare. No one knows what it is, but everyone can tell it's something. It's presidential. In fact, not making this up, I'm about to get in the car, guy comes up, says, man, what is that? I ain't never seen one of them before. Nice guy, perfectly nice guy. And just smitten with the car. And I said, yeah, it's called a Toyota Century. And he says, man, that thing is presidential. That's the word that he, presidential. So these guys spoke a design language that could be heard by a fully Alabama Airbnb tenant thousands of miles away in the United States. It's a language that everyone understands. And that's why this car, one of the many reasons why this car is incredible. And for being something, it sure costs nothing. This is the most expensive car Toyota makes. New Centuries are 25 million yen or 160,000 with today's exchange rate. In 1997, this car had a base price of 12 million yen, about $100,000 at the time, $200,000 adjusted for inflation. After all, this is a hand-built V12 limo car, but I paid a little over $14,000 shipped for this vehicle with about another 3,000 in tariffs, import fees, bond, tax, title registration. That's less than a depreciation hit on a new BMW after you drive it off the lot and you're getting one of the most luxurious vehicles ever made. I'd rather own a first or second generation Toyota Century than most modern ultra luxury European cars with half the mileage. It's inexpensive, it's reliable, it's durable, it's luxurious, stylish, fun to drive. Everything about this car is what luxury should be. It's like a well-tailored suit. It gets attention without demanding it. And maybe the most interesting thing about the Century is that even with a car this incredible, Japan still somehow kept it a secret.