A 6.6-pound inline-six that runs on premium gasoline, spins to 10,000 rpm, and makes 1.6 horsepower. That’s not a typo. It’s a desktop engine from Stirlingkit, and it might be the most absurd — and revealing — tribute to the Toyota 2JZ ever built.
YouTuber JohnnyQ90 recently put the miniature powerplant through its paces, and the results land somewhere between engineering marvel and cautionary tale. Dubbed the “.02JZ,” this 28cc six-cylinder requires a miniature starter motor to fire, feeds itself through its own oil pump, and cools its tiny cylinders with a functional radiator. It sounds like the real thing, just pitched up to a frequency that suggests an angry hornet trapped in a tin can.
The spec sheet promises a 10,000 rpm redline, well beyond anything a stock JZ-series engine ever touched. The turbocharger, a nod to the single-turbo conversions that became gospel in the Supra tuner community, proved less useful. JohnnyQ90 ended up pulling it off entirely.
The included water pump also failed to circulate coolant, forcing him to rig an external unit. Even at 28cc, an inline-six demands respect — and troubleshooting.
That this thing exists at all tells you everything about the 2JZ’s gravitational pull, three decades after it debuted under the hood of the A80 Supra. The original engine has been stuffed into Volvos, Ladas, and virtually anything with an engine bay and a dreamer behind the wrench. Its twin-turbo factory configuration became the starting point for four-figure horsepower builds that turned a grand tourer into a drag strip weapon.
The 2JZ didn’t just power a car. It powered a culture. And Toyota still can’t escape it.
When the A90 Supra arrived sharing its platform and inline-six with the BMW Z4, the backlash was immediate and unforgiving. Enthusiasts didn’t want a perfectly competent BMW B58 under the hood. They wanted something with a Toyota casting number.
The partnership made business sense — developing a bespoke sports car powertrain is ruinously expensive for shrinking volumes — but it handed the car’s soul to Munich. Toyota has hinted at future performance projects, including a next-generation MR2 and continued GR development. None of those programs appear to involve a successor to the JZ family.
The company that built one of the most revered engines in automotive history has effectively ceded that territory. So the faithful build their own tributes.
Stirlingkit’s .02JZ is a functioning mechanical sculpture, a thing you assemble on a workbench instead of an engine hoist. It won’t push a Supra through a quarter-mile, but it captures something the real car’s BMW-powered replacement never quite managed: the irrational, obsessive devotion that a great engine inspires.
There’s talk of using the 28cc six to power a remote-control car. That would be fitting. The 2JZ legacy has always been about taking something Toyota built and doing something Toyota never intended with it.
Whether the displacement is 3,000cc or 28, the impulse is the same. The .02JZ costs real money, demands real fuel, and breaks in real ways. It is, in miniature, exactly what the original was in full size — a beautifully overbuilt thing that invites you to push it further than the factory ever planned.
The only difference is the scale. The obsession is identical.
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