---
title: '1991 Toyota MR2 2GR V6 Swap: Regular Car Reviews'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zMsDbzURRAE'
video_id: 'zMsDbzURRAE'
date: 2026-07-01
duration_sec: 1465
---

# 1991 Toyota MR2 2GR V6 Swap: Regular Car Reviews

> Source: [1991 Toyota MR2 2GR V6 Swap: Regular Car Reviews](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zMsDbzURRAE)

## Summary

The video is a review of a 1991 Toyota MR2 with a 2GR V6 engine swap. The host discusses the engine's origins, performance, and the practical aspects of the swap, while also reflecting on the MR2's legacy as a unique and affordable sports car. The review includes driving impressions and technical details.

### Key Points

- **2GR V6 Performance** [04:05] — The 2GR V6 makes 275 hp at 6200 RPM and 257 lb-ft at 4700 RPM, making the swapped MR2 lighter and more powerful than a naturally aspirated Supra.
- **Engine Availability** [08:08] — The 2GR V6 is commonly found in Toyota Siennas, Camrys, RAV4s, and Lexus models, making it cheap and easy to source.
- **Transmission Bolt Issue** [11:14] — The engine is held to the transmission by only four out of eight bolts, yet has survived track days without issue.
- **Cooling System** [12:27] — The MR2's cooling system is massive, with three gallons of coolant and long hard lines, providing excellent thermal capacity.
- **Engine Width and Shifter Modification** [10:07] — The 2GR V6 is narrower than the original four-cylinder, which required spacers for the shifter cables.
- **Common 2GR Issues** [15:07] — Common 2GR problems include oil leaks from the front timing cover, water pump leaks, and failing rubber oil cooler lines.
- **Blue-Collar Performance** [22:10] — The MR2 is described as a 'blue-collar performance' car, with a workmanlike engine in a body that can handle the aggression.

## Transcript

That was so good. Me merging on the 422 with this is like waiting for the drum solo and in the air tonight. Yeah.
It's like here it comes and merch time. Ooh. Yep. Stoyote. Awesome. Awesome. What's up BMW M5 this thing feels like it would just sit at 110 and not care.
Yeah. It does. Yeah. It's dangerous. Not not. This is going to kill me by the day. If you want to. Yeah. Whoa. How did that move that quick?
What the hell? I don't want to call this like a Swiss army knife. It feels like a really good chef's knife.
Yeah. How that BMW was right behind us.
Yeah. He's got turbos. Yeah. Greatest car ever made, greatest car ever made, greatest car ever made.
But first this scene. My name is Jeremy Shaneeman. I'm a 21 year old from Jasper, Indiana. My mom has a framed airbrush portrait of Kyle Rittenhouse in the living room and my dad
is building a community playground modeled after January 6th. I span my evenings drawing Luna online stationery and then burning the pages before dad finds
them during his nightly room investigations. But July 4th weekend is coming up and I'm going to Pittsburgh with my friends I met on Park. My cover story of fireworks and baseball is working and I'm ready to party nonstop.
This weekend is never ever going to end. I am full of Celsius and 99 bananas and I'm never going to run out of energy. I'm going to OD on EDM and then I'm going to jump in the Allegheny River outside the David
Lawrence Convention Center. Do you feel that 21 year old energy? That's what a 2GR swapped MR2 feels like. It feels like go go go go go go bigger harder fuller shooting thick ropes.
It's me Jeremy Shaneeman again, I know I'm going to be in trouble when I get home but that's Tuesday's problem right now.
This is a 2GR swapped second gen MR2 or SW20 although later in this video I will find that in the United States SW20 is not the true chassis code.
The hierarchy of second generation MR2s goes like this. You had the naturally aspirated 4 cylinders, they made 130 horsepower, then Toyota had the turbocharged 3SGT engines, those made 200 horsepower and 200 pound feet of torque.
If you wanted more power in the 90s you had to buy the Supra. You could have a naturally aspirated 2J Supra, those were cheaper, those would get you 220
horsepower and 210 pound feet of torque. But here's the fun thing, the 2GR V6 makes 275 horsepower at 6200 RPM and 257 pound feet
of torque at 4700 RPM. This V6 MR2 is lighter and makes more power than a naturally aspirated 4th gen Supra.
And if you don't know too much about what the 2GR is, that's fine. The 2GR FE V6 is one of those engines that never got the spotlight but it should have. See, V6s are always built as the opening or feature act but never a headliner, V8s and
big power turbo fours, they get on the, they're the headliner, they get on the 4U page. V6s, I mean, for most car enthusiasts to know a V6 by name, it either has to be an industry
upsetter like Buick's 3.8 Turbo 6 from the Buick Grand National or so universal that the algorithm can't ignore it like the Honda J series. But the 2GR V6 from Toyota, most people don't know about how good it is.
It's like, and I mean this with nothing but love, it's like the musician Vic Rugeiro, a multi-instrumentalist with a long career and endless collaborations and when you hear
what he can do live, you'll think, my God, where have you been? The 2GR V6s, most famously powers the Toyota CNM minivan. But in that situation, it showed the world that a minivan could maintain 90 miles an hour
with the same smoothness as a BMW. You'll also find the 2GR in most mid-tier lexases that grandparents buy and then ignore. And an honorable mention goes to the one Toyota RAV4 that came with the 2GR V6.
And that engine transform, I mean, normally RAV4 is a four bangers, normally a RAV4 is just a grass and gravel grocery getter. But when paired with the 2GR, it turned into a free-way merging machine and towny, whole-shot
surprise. What's going on in the air when it's a rise in the consumer service, that's your name! Charles Hurr, all right, the whole-shot surprise, that's made for a bust!
God damn it! This V6 has a 7,200 RPM red line. So that means when you put it in the MR2, you shift this when your tack needle is deep
into the red. Driving a 2GR swapped MR2 feels like trying to walk an adolescent great dain that finally grew into its legs. Or trying to babysit a 21-year-old on their birthday who got their first taste of buzzballs.
Or babysitting a closeted red-state siss male discovering himself. You can get 2GR V6s from anywhere. And this particular one came from the Lexus RX350.
Oh, and by the way, the 2GR V6s also are found in Lotus Amuras and the Lotus Evora, which is as close as whatever come to a gen 4 MR2.
I keep calling it the hood, some people want to call it the engine cover, I don't know. Immediately, I'm seeing something that shouldn't be there. That shouldn't be there. No. It should have the prop. No. My car never had the prop.
It was missing when I bought it. Oh, okay. Did you make those brackets yourself? No. This was a kit. I can't remember who made it. I've had it on the car for like eight years. Yeah. Yeah.
I feel so bad. I'm immediately the whole point of this car is the engine immediately getting excited about the hood prop. So this engine is the 2GR V6. How many different cars did Toyota use this engine?
A lot. This one specifically is out of Lexus RX 350, but also in Siena's, Camry's, Rav4's, Lexus ES 300's, Toyota Avalon's, pretty much everything between like 2008 and a couple of years ago
and they stopped using the V6. Was, did this engine exist in different, like, states of tune between, okay, like it was in the IS 350, it was much higher tune than it would be if you were in your grandma's
or family's Siena. When it was in the IS, was it tuned for 91 at that time? Really. So what did they change in the engine between the Siena and the sort of sports sedan versions
of this engine to have it make up now? I know that intake manifolds are different. Oh. I know there's like, there's like three different intake manifolds you can get for this engine depending on what application it was because in here, because this is a, you know, transverse
or, yeah, and in the IS 300, it would be longitude, so the intakes are different. Okay, so you had different intake manifolds, but then you would also, I'm guessing the simple
things ignition advance and maybe compression, but compression would imply like different pistons. Yeah. They're all underheads. There are different pistons for this, but they're for the hybrid. I know all the non-hybrid ones are pretty much the same, but I know one of the things people
do to hot rod them is they put the hybrid pistons in them, and at that point, you're tearing down one of these engines. Yeah. Oh, man. But like, looking at it up close, because normally every time I see the one GR or the two GR,
they're covered in plastic, stuff like that, and especially in any Lexus, they're like don't look at it. Yeah. But there's really not this engine, this V6 is so compact. Yeah. Like if you had a cover here, it would almost look like it was a four cylinder, and it's
actually narrower than the four cylinders that were MS, because one of the problems I ended up having was because this V6 is narrower than the four cylinders. Yeah. It changed where the shifter cables came out.
Oh. So I actually had to put some spacers, and there I made some out of aluminum, so they would, it would shift right because before it was, it was binding. Oh. So if you look kind of down in there, there is a couple like pieces of aluminum plate, and
it's because I was having some issues with this cable binding, because where the bracket is now with the V6, so there's a shorter V6, the V6 is shorter than the four cylinder, it
means that the transmission's actually shifted a little bit too. Oh. Okay. I have, this is originally a non-turbo car. I have a turbo transmission in there, and I also have an L-steana as well. Sweet.
So the transmission that's hooked up to this is what transmission? It's a U153 out of a 92 turbo. Okay. And the bolt pattern's the same. Uh, yes and no. Oh.
You can get, there's like, you can get four holes lined up. So there's four bolts holding it together, but out of how many? Like 12. No, no, for real.
It's not 12 bolts that hold the transmission on, really? No. Well, like, in this stock car, but there's like heat shield, there's like shields and stuff to that. Okay. Um, I think it's, it's like eight normally or something like that.
Okay. So half the amount of bolts, half the amount of bolts, a lot of people have done it and believe it, we're running it for years and knowing how many trouble with it. Three of the holes that the bolts are through were pre-tapped. Okay.
One of them, there was a hole already in the 2GR that wasn't being used, but it lined up so I had to tap and heal the coil of that one. Okay. So. All right. So four out of eight. Yeah. Are holding the gear box on.
Okay. Yeah. All right. And how many, how many miles have you driven it? Like that? Um. Have you driven it hard? Yeah. Like hard poles? Okay. And all right. Nothing weird shifting around or?
Hmm. All right then. I've been really mean to her. Oh nice. She's taking it. Pretty good. So stock coolant system. MR2 is a pretty robust of a coolant. Oh yeah.
There's like three gallons of coolant in it. I remember I had to change the thermostat because the thermostat was stuck open and it wasn't getting any heat. So okay. You have to drain coolant and burp it. And we were there trying to get the radiator fans to turn on.
And we're just there. It's idling for a half an hour and it still didn't turn on. And it wasn't until we actually started revving it, revving it, revving it hard. And then finally the fans kicked on for like 20 seconds and they're like, okay, we're cool
again. Yeah. For people who don't understand because the motors are here, excuse me, engines are here. And your radiator is all the way up here. You have big, thick, heavy hard lines that run underneath the car all the way back.
So as the coolant travels from the engine to the radiator, it's already cooling off. Because it's underneath the car, presumably you're moving, air is going over it.
Then it gets to the radiator. Then it cools off and then it takes a scenic route all the way back. But that also means that all these lines hold a like an extra, how many, like at least a half gallon, maybe more of coolant that's just always not being used.
So the thermal capacity of all MR2s is massive. I was told by my buddy Justin Bernas, you know him from the giveaways, but he used to have a shop called Prime MR2 over in Jersey.
And he said, when they would just do auto cross stuff with MR2s, people say, do I need a new radiator? Do I need extra cooling fans or better cooling fans? He's like, no, no, just take them out, do a whole track day with them on the stock cooling
system. They don't care. They just stay cool. Have you experienced the same thing now that you have more cylinders? Yeah, I haven't had any issues with coolant at all.
I learned something new. I always call them SW20s, but why am I seeing SW21? Because this was originally a non-turbo car and non-turbo cars were actually SW21 and actually
turbo cars were actually SW22s. There wasn't any, I think Japanese market ones were the ones that say SW20 on the day. Oh, so is this just the initial default that they called it the SW20 in the game and everybody
watched it like, that's what this is. The MR2 was quick-ish for its day, but with this modern V6, it's being shoved into the future and it wants to be there. The car feels limitless.
Now, the 2GR isn't like an LS engine. The 2GR has its problems. These things are known to leak oil from the front timing cover. The water pump is known to leak and even had a recall over failing rubber oil cooler lines
that spill more oil than a tanker for British petroleum. The 2GR became a popular MR2 swap because of price, honestly. Yes, there were kits to put a Honda K engine in here or an F20, that's true.
And if you want maximum power out of your second generation MR2, well then you need the fourth generation 3SGTE turbo for out of the Toyota Caldina.
And then you do boost control, throttle body and tune and you can make 350 at the wheels. In fact, we drove one of those when Justin still had a shop. But that's a JDM engine that was never sold in the United States.
So you have to pay for the engine before you can even pay for the engine, you know, shipping and everything. Whereas getting minivan engines or Lexus engines or Camry engines, they're all 2GRV-6's
in-they-go and all the parts you want at any retail shop. And if you really wanted to, you could use one of the Ciena engines because those are detuned a little bit so they can run 87 octane so you could have a really fast sports car that
uses cheap gas. How cool is that? What the surginess, the wide torque band of this engine in this car, every gear change feels like it's loading up one of those slingshots, you know, the supposedly illegal ones.
I'm going back to the 90s here, those ones with the surgical tubing and the wrist brace. Every time you pull this gear shifter back, it feels like the car is just loading itself up again because this engine has been set free.
It's no longer in a seven or eight passenger minivan, it's in a two seat mid-engine sports car, so it's just yum, yum, yum, every gear change.
And I believe what she said that someone in Bonneville with the correct gearing got a second gen MR2 to go 210 miles an hour with one of these engines. The only thing that made me feel weird driving this is knowing that only four bolts hold
this transmission to the engine out of supposedly eight. And I've driven sketchy stuff, but if this thing survived track days with only four bolts holding the engine transmission together, well, I guess that is good enough.
In the pressed flesh of cars and coffee crowds and the professional goalpost movers, the MR2 is an artifact of democratized performance because you can do plenty with this engine
and drivetrain. You can break this car in a video game sense long before you break this car in a mechanical sense, because Toyota didn't appear to be holding this to the same standard as the Supra or the Celica.
So the MR2 was free to be weird, Toyota didn't have to build this car. That's why I say it's the greatest car ever made in my horny opinion. Look, in the 1980s, Toyota and Honda were the hot new company, showing the world what
reliable performance could be. Their corollas and cameras were love. They didn't need to make a mid-engine sports car. They had the Celica and they had the Supra, but they did it anyway.
And then in 1990s, Toyota became the gold standard of reliable performance. They didn't need to keep making a mid-engine sports car. After all, they had the Supra, but they did it anyway and added a turbo.
If the Toyota Supra is dad's draft-day meal ticket out of the boonies, then the MR2 is the less-favored son who's free to pursue a degree in brewing. It may or may not ever be lucrative for him, but some people put passion ahead of solvency.
And you can't say the MR2 is here for any other reason than performance manifest destiny. Toyota only got to be number one because they weren't afraid to bust in public. They made this weird little coop with rally-car dynamics that got spanked by every metric
by Mazda with the Miata. The Miata of any generation is still a better car, a better car at caring than an MR2. But the MR2 still became one of the brand's greatest cult classics because Toyota didn't
give a smooth shit about perception. It was the type of swing they wouldn't take again until Alexis LFA, except I mean, the first generation MR2, they made the platform, but then they just grabbed the whole bunch
of corolla stuff, turned it around backwards, and put it in the middle. Toyota was Tony Stark, and every other automaker was Jeff Bridges, complaining that they made this from a box of scraps.
But it's appealed and necessarily end at what came from stock, and this would remain true in subsequent generations. You engine swapped second generation MR2s because the build quality of everything around it wouldn't
penalize you for ambition. But then that leaves the question, is possibility a rubber stamp? Is a swap justifiable simply because it's possible? Well, the answer is the same as it's always been.
It's justifiable to a point. It has to make sense with the overall build, otherwise you just end up with a car that has all the dimension detail and efficiency of a YouTube thumbnail. The road to hell's gaping clownhole is paved with ideas that mechanically work right up until
the moment it's wrapped around a tree, like champagne-room legs, around a congressman's face. But the thing is, this is what we think of when we hear engine swap. We think of ships of theses where ambition and reality are two negotiations who are miles
apart on contract terms. It's up to the owner to get ambition and reality to meet as close to the middle as possible, and it's not always possible. Yet builds like this suggest that the compromise is simply building practicality, a practical
build makes sense if you want a car that will last longer and can be run harder. And I feel like this is part of that more practical build. In addition to the 2GR, this is equipped with the E153 transmission from the 1992 MR2 Turbo
model. You can't use the transmissions from the naturally aspirated 4 cylinders behind a 2GR. It'll just break. You want to build one of these things. You need the transmission that came with the turbo, and that's Toyota's E153.
This car also has an aftermarket limited slip differential, billet aluminum rear knuckles, a Wilhelm racework suspension geometry kit, KW coil overs, an under tunnel brace, poly bushings
and sway bars. And then like a cherry on top, Salika GTS steering wheel. The MR2 is not the workman's car, but it's running on a workman like engine. A corporate V6 built simply to endure and then die like a 14th century anybody.
But what if you let the old junkyard dog off its leash? No, what if you put the old junkyard dog in a body that can keep up with all that aggression? That's what this MR2 is. This is blue collar performance, honest, consistent with suppressed rage kept at bay by pesky things
like laws and social norms. So if you get the chance to drive a 2GR swapped MR2, please do. It's one of the greatest experiences you'll have.
And if you're thinking about buying a second generation MR2, and if you find one that's been swapped and swapped right, it'll be one of the greatest cars you'll ever buy. I can get the final drive of the V6 Camry for the 90s and drop the art games a little bit.
Yeah. And you can probably cruise really fast, I don't even do that though. Right, because I mean these are aerodynamic, but Toyota never intended this thing to go
through the air that quick. No. So somebody did run one of these at Bonnet on a thing, but it's like 215 or something like that. The car feels bored right now at this speed.
Man, driving this thing in traffic has to be like a nightmare, because you have all this power and all this torque and an engine that's just hungry all the time, and you're going 30. Yeah.
Yeah. I tend to not mind traffic in my AW11, but that's just because I'm like, well, I got 112 horsepower. Who am I doing anything right now? I'm literally just commuting. Yeah.
I'm just going through 234-343-322-232. Yeah. Man, it is tough to rev, whoop, tough to rev match because it's so touchy.
Yeah. That throttle is a switch. Maybe I just have to let the throwout bearing do its thing? Yeah. Or not throwout bearing. What am I thinking of?
Synchros. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds so good. Once you, the music happens at six.
Yeah. I would never get tired of that. Yeah.