Driving and Researching the Toyota Harrier Zagato

Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

First Approach

The Toyota Harrier Zagato – a bizarre collaboration between Toyota and Zagato — has been on my radar for a long time, but I truly never thought I’d even see one up close. So when the opportunity to do a deep dive with one came up, I pitched it to various journalist contacts: I will travel to photograph and write about this car, in exchange for some amount of money.

The responses, while polite, were hung up on the money part, and also expressed concern that this story was unlikely to find views. It’s a niche-within-a-niche, and freelance budgets are tight. I understood completely: why should a publication fund my weird passion project?

So I thought about it: instead of an article for them, I could just do a video for me. A new fear set in: if I didn’t make this video, D*** D***** would. I bought the plane ticket.

The New Approach

A lesson that I’ve learned about myself (and re-learned), is that I don’t enjoy writing reviews. Cars, products — whichever. Giving impressions and showing the features is like pulling teeth for me, and I feel obligated to cover every single aspect, which, coincidentally, I’m also bad at doing.

But I like creating something else — telling the history, measuring the impact, or finding some emotional arc. Framing something as a story, or even a documentary, opens up a million possibilities for me.

It’s with this mindset that I eagerly approached this project. Someone could make a great car review, but to me it seemed like a better opportunity to trace the history and answer the question: how did this happen?

Filming

I went to Ohio in early June and spent an afternoon shooting the Harrier Zagato. I drove it for maybe 15-20 minutes — I could have spent more time, but I knew the driving impression wasn’t really the point of what I was making.

At this point, I had only started researching the car. In addition to getting a lot of hero shots, B-roll, and a few still images, I also took pictures of everything I could find that had written markings — doorjamb stickers, VIN tags, and owner’s manual documents — so I could have things to take back with me and translate.

Putting it all Together

It was a unique challenge to research a car that has been entirely un-researched in the west. This car came and went in 1998, before the internet as we know it, so there’s almost nothing out there, and even the basic timing was a mystery when I went into this.

I really aimed to put together the most complete English-language history of this vehicle, and in the process, I even found the design sketch of the Harrier Zagato in a book, which has never been digitized until now.

Of course, there’s always more that can be done — more research — but at some point, you have to decide it’s finished. I thought I had found the designer, a fact which he confirmed it to me… two days after the video had been released.

Huge thanks to Myron Vernis and Bradley Brownell for the opportunity to make this happen.