The first time I laid eyes on the AE86 High Sonic Toning paint scheme must have been somewhere late 2006. Miguel from Newera Imports joined our small community and posted photos of his own project: a late type Toyota Corolla Levin GT Apex in black over grey paint. I was blown away by the paint scheme and it just simply works very well on an AE86!

Juicebox videos

Over the past two weeks Juicebox has been posting two videos featuring cars owned by his mate Sean. Sean owns a wide variety of cars as he used to love and adore Toyotas but recently found new love in Mitsubishi Pajeros. In the first video a Sprinter Trueno GT Apex is featured while in the second video features a duo of Starlets: a Turbo-S and GT Advance. The common denominator of the three is the paint scheme: all three are in black over grey.

High Sonic Toning on the AE86

In the second video it’s mentioned that all three cars feature the same color scheme. So I started to wonder if it actually was the exact same color scheme. For the AE86 it’s easy: the black over grey two-tone non-panda paint scheme is called High Sonic Toning and has the color code 2X1. You won’t be able to find any information about this color code anywhere. 2X1 is a Japan only paint scheme and only available on 3 door GT variants of the (kouki) late model. This was not available on the European nor the USDM AE86s, but not too unsimilar to some other schemes.

Is the paint schem on the two Starlets the same?

It was a lot harder to find the color code for the Starlet Turbo-S EP71. The brochures don’t mention the paint scheme nor the code and enlarging plus enhancing grainy JPEGs in Photoshop didn’t help either. What I was able to find is that if you search for High Sonic (ハイソニック) and EP71 you will find some (Japanese) resources with the Turbo-S in black over grey. So yes it’s sharing the same paint scheme name.

The Starlet GT Advance EP82 was a little less effort to figure out: the nice people at UKStarletowners have the brochure of the GT Advance available on their forums. In contrary to the EP71 brochure it also mentions the color codes: 205/182. That’s definitely not the same color code as the AE86 has, so what’s up? Well I think Toyota must have abandoned creating a separate color code for a two-tone paint scheme. Instead they mention the two colors used: 205 (black) and 182 (blueish grey). So is this scheme is actually the same as the AE86 and EP71?

The Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT Apex Black Limited models used the same black color as other black AE86s. This color code is 204 and is, just like 205, called Black Metallic. At the same time for other AE86 two-tone paint schemes from 1986 and 1987 Medium Grey Metallic (159) or Grey Metallic (164) was used. So this means most probably the 2X1 color scheme is either 204/159 or 204/164.

Another proof can be found in a Speedhunters article by Paddy McGrath featuring both Sean’s Starlets side by side. Here you can see that the EP71 and EP82 slightly differ in paint scheme: the black is a bit deeper on the EP82. Also the grey is a bit lighter and more silvery on the EP71 while the EP82 has a bit more blueish hue. In conclusion: this means the two are not the same paint scheme but very similar.

Conclusion on the black over grey paint scheme

Personally I would prefer the High Sonic Toning paint scheme over any AE86 panda paint scheme. It looks much fresher and maybe I’m getting a bit tired over seeing the panda scheme everywhere?

For your enjoyment, here are the two videos by Juicebox side by side: