Anime conventions are a time to let your inner weeb out. Buy merch in the Exhibitors’ Hall, get fan-created items in the Artist Alley, absolutely suck at rhythm games in the arcade, and cosplay to your heart’s content.

It might be a bit out of the ordinary, then, to come across a Supra—one that looks like it rolled out of the showroom, so not an itasha—parked in the middle of the convention center accompanied by employees in Toyota Gazoo Racing shirts.

Anime Impulse is a series of conventions held in a variety of locations; for 2025, this entails Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Anaheim, and Dallas. Santa Clara is a new stop for AI, which previously hosted its Bay Area con in San Mateo but opted for the larger Santa Clara Convention Center (located across the street from Great America and Levi’s Stadium this year. While overshadowed by the larger McEnery Convention Center in downtown San Jose, SCCC is no stranger to anime cons either as it was the site of the inaugural Crunchyroll Expo in 2017.

AI is held in conjunction with Collectors Expo, a trading card show, and the K-pop centric K-PLAY! Fest. In Santa Clara, Collectors Expo was sequestered in its own wing while K-PLAY! was sandwiched between Anime Impulse’s vendors and artist alley-slash-arcade.

Toyota falls under the former category, but is also a presenting sponsor for the convention. This meant its branding was packaged in with the welcome banner at the entrance to the SCCC.

It’s easy to gawk and wonder why the heck Toyota—particularly the American branch—is so invested into anime. Sure, they hail from the country where it’s created. Sure, racing anime is certainly a thing but they typically don’t enjoy the same success as their stick-and-ball counterparts.

What Toyota USA sees, however, is an opportunity to tap into one of the most popular forms of media in the West among younger demographics.

Welcome to GRIP. An anime commissioned by Toyota USA and premiering in 2024, it is set in a dystopian universe where operating motor vehicles has become a soulless action under the watch of a megacorp. The heroes, a crew of drivers and Toyota enthusiasts, try to go against the system by revitalizing the joy of driving. Of course, product placement is prominent for Toyota Gazoo Racing North America (formerly known as TRD USA) and their cars like the GR Supra and GR 86.

For what’s obviously an advertisement, it’s honestly a pretty solid project idea and Toyota has every reason to show it off when they can.

Toyota wasn’t shy about making its presence felt inside the center either. Its booth was situated right by the Anime Impulse stage used for performances and was by far the largest of all vendors regardless of convention.

The booth was separated from the outside world by a large hexagonal-patterned wall. On the outside was the entrance, featuring a giant screen displaying clips from GRIP and even a line queue. By personal account, the queue was really only needed during peak con hours and the crowd mostly tapered off by the afternoon.

A desk with tablets greeted attendees at the entrance, where they were to fill out an optional survey asking topics like Toyota vehicles they were interested in—of course, 131‘s on-site reporter-slash-anime fanboy put down the Tacoma and Land Cruiser—or owned (Camry) and whether they’d like to subscribe for news from the manufacturer.

Upon crossing the gate, one was put in a line along other guests. Once it was your turn, you were ushered into either the Supra or 86 on display.

Inside was a tablet to fill out a personality test. The questions concern the taker’s driving style and would basically group them into one of three categories: circuit-style racing, drifting, or off-road (guess which we fell under). Whatever answer is given has no bearing on the rest of the exhibit. At the end, a photo is taken and converted into an anime style for a GRIP “official team license”; a team member pointed out that headgear shouldn’t interfere with the camera, for those who don’t want their receding hairlines to be obvious.

Once that was squared away, there were three options: leave, make a license plate, or do the VR sim.

The vanity license plates are made by writing down the combination you want then handing them to a table where they’re produced, typically within the hour. They’re metal and are pretty solid pieces (make sure your handwriting is legible; our “131OFRD” plate became “1310FRD” because the O looked like a zero).

The VR sim entails a handful of laps around a cyberpunk-style track. The objective of the sim is to set the fastest time.

From our reporter’s experience, the steering was absurdly volatile, typically not being registered until he steered too much only for the car to overcorrect and drift into the wall. But then again, the car was designed to be drifted and our guy is pretty garbage at that so who knows?

By accounts from employees running the sim, some congoers eventually return for more attempts to get the hang of it too.

It’s probably not a surprise that Toyota would pull off such an elaborate booth for a convention they’re the presenting sponsor of. Anime Impulse and its sisters are also industry-based conventions (as opposed to fan-organized cons, local examples of such being FanimeCon and OffKai Expo in San Jose; conversely, industry cons would be those like Anime Expo in Los Angeles), so corporate backing was sure to be heavy. K-PLAY! Fest had some nifty sponsor activation too with a giant ramen cup at Indomie’s booth for photo ops.

At the end of the day, TGRNA and Toyota USA seem to have the right idea with how to promote their brand, at least in the States. Of course, the other way of simply excelling on the track is just as successful judging by how their NASCAR, NHRA, and Championship Off-Road arms are doing.

Featured image credit: Justin Nguyen