Toyota GR Yaris Review

Your standard hot-hatch recipe is pretty simple. Take a humdrum hatchback, give it a gutsy engine and a few go-faster parts, and serve with body-hugging sports seats and plenty of badges. This combo remains the blueprint followed by cars like the Volkswagen Golf GTI, Ford Focus ST and BMW 128ti, and has proved enduringly popular with British buyers.

The GR Yaris is not your standard hot hatch, however. This is a bespoke rally-racing monster, purpose-built by Toyota to tackle proper competitions. As a result, it's a far more substantial re-engineering than most hot hatches, with a unique three-door body exclusive to the GR Yaris, featuring ludicrously flared wheelarches and menacing bumpers.

Toyota's equipped the GR Yaris with some serious hardware beneath the purposeful exterior. At first, you might be surprised it's still using a little three-cylinder engine like regular Yaris models. You won't feel outgunned, however, because this is the world's most powerful production three-cylinder engine, making a mighty 257hp, or 276hp following its 2024 facelift.

That's a mountain of power for such a small car – the GR Yaris is less than four metres long and weighs around 1,300kg unladen. This means scintillating performance if you keep your foot pressed into the carpet, as well as plenty of muscle lower in the rev range when you're just cruising around. The 0-62mph dash takes 5.5 seconds, or 5.2 for facelift cars. Those numbers are right in the mix with the hottest hatches on the market, but anecdotal reports suggest the GR Yaris might be even faster in the real world.

The engine is just one part of the story, however. Much of the car's prodigious pace comes from its ultra-trick four-wheel-drive system, which we'll talk about in more detail lower down. Another contributing factor is the GR Yaris's six-speed manual gearbox, which has delightfully short ratios to help you feel like a WRC hero as you bang through the gears.

Ultimately, the GR Yaris is a car you need to 'get'. If the idea of a real-deal rally car for the road sounds good to you – along with all the compromises in practicality and comfort that come with it – then very few cars will thrill you the way the GR Yaris does. Even compared to many great hot hatches, the GR Yaris feels more purposeful, more focused and more exciting. And that may just be its undoing for you – because it's a pricey package without the all-round ability of something like a Golf GTI, which delivers (some of the) driving fun with barely any compromises.

Get settled in the GR Yaris and you'll find the cabin is more-or-less the same as the standard Yaris. That means decent material quality in most of the places you'll touch, and sturdy build quality that feels like it'll handle whatever abuse you throw at it. The layout is clear and intuitive, with proper buttons and knobs for the climate controls, infotainment volume and system shortcuts. As a result, you're rarely stuck hunting around for the controls you want.

Despite the obvious usability benefits of the GR Yaris's layout, it doesn't feel as special as the car's driving experience. There's a little too much black and dark-coloured trim for our tastes, without much in the way to contrast it. Toyota has at least added a few unique GR touches. Most obvious are the body-hugging sports seats with neat part-suede upholstery, complete with red stitching to match the steering wheel and gear stick – the GR Yaris is now the only Yaris to get a manual shifter.

All GR Yaris models feature the same high-mounted eight-inch touchscreen infotainment system that's widely used in other small Toyotas. It's definitely not the car's strongest point, falling short of the most high-tech rivals for graphical quality, touch responsiveness and screen size. The software isn't great, either, with a slightly slapdash menu layout and a few too many clashing fonts and graphics for our liking. None of this really matters, however, because all models include Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so you can simply bypass Toyota's mediocre software, and use your favourite apps directly through the screen.

There are some plus-points to the infotainment setup, however. There are proper physical shortcut buttons flanking the screen on pre-facelift cars to easily jump between functions. A nice touch is that the 'map' button will open your preferred mapping app on the screen through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, while some rivals will insist this shortcut only goes to the car's built-in navigation software. Equally, we like that the screen still has a proper volume knob, rather than the fiddly touch interfaces on some competitors.

The 2024 update brought a refreshed dashboard with a bluff, squared-off quality – apparently designed with input from Toyota's racing drivers for better outward visibility – although most of the actual controls remain unchanged. Other updates include a digital driver's screen to replace the pre-facelift car's old-school analogue dials – this is either a pro or a con depending on your point of view.

Hot hatches usually make great all-rounders because they blend a sporty driving experience with everyday practicality. The GR Yaris doesn't quite pull off this trick. Its regular Yaris sibling was already one of the smallest hatches in its class, and the GR's unique three-door body style means it's even more compromised.

Space for front-seat passengers is perfectly adequate, with enough adjustability for most adults to find a comfortable position. There's no lumbar adjustment on the bulky bucket seats, but they're comfier than they look and, despite the thick bolsters to hold you in place through corners, they're easier to get in than the rigid units you'll find in sporty Ford or Honda models, for example.

The rear seats, however, are a bit of a joke. Access is laughably bad – the seat-folding mechanism only flips the backrest forward by a few inches, so you'll need to be a contortionist to snake your way into the back row. Adding insult to injury, the folded front seat has no memory, so has to be readjusted once your rear passengers have piled in. There are just two rear seats with a sculpted 'tray' between them for storage. Legroom is poor, as you'd expect, but headroom is virtually nonexistent with even short adults unable to fit back there. There are two Isofix points back there but you'd be a braver person than us if you actually tried to used them as intended.

Between the clever four-wheel-drive system underneath and the taut three-door body on top, cargo space is also compromised. You get just 174 litres of space, which is small by anyone's standards, but should be enough for a couple of cabin suitcases or a mid-week food shop top-up. Supermarket deliveries exist specifically so you don't have to have a practical car...

Our recommendation is to treat the GR Yaris as a two seater and fold the pointless rear bench down. This leaves a larger and more useful cargo area, which Toyota reckons is big enough to store a spare set of wheels if you're headed to a track day.

Forget practicality, however, because the GR Yaris is all about performance, and the monster that lurks under the bonnet plays a key role here. The on-paper description doesn't sound all that exciting – a 1.6-litre turbocharged three-cylinder petrol. Remember, however, that this engine happens to be the world's most powerful production three-cylinder, so it punches far above its weight suggests.

In our pre-facelift test car, you get 257hp and a quoted 0-62mph time of 5.5 seconds, but we've heard of testers returning acceleration runs below five seconds. It's easy to believe, too. Ample performance low in the rev range builds to an eye-swivelling crescendo if you pin the throttle. As you'd hope from a modern turbo engine, there's loads of mid-range grunt, so you can make swift progress without having to wring the car out. However, it's worth holding onto lower gears because the engine develops an especially manic quality at the top of the rev range, making it feel like the car's being propelled by a million furious hornets.

Keeping the engine spun up at its angriest speed is made easier by the snappy six-speed manual. Its gear ratios are closely stacked, so you'll need to work the shifter and clutch to achieve the stated performance figures. What a joy it is, though, because you can fire off two or three full-bore shifts on every motorway slip road, making you feel like a real-deal WRC racer. Impressively for a manual car with four-wheel drive, it's very easy to pull away from a stop, with none of the binding, lugging or bouncing you get in some less-refined 4WD rivals. An eight-speed auto was added as an option for the 2024 update, but we think this car is at its best with the manual 'box.

The GR Yaris's four-wheel-drive system is pretty clever, too. It's set up to deliberately overdrive the rear wheels – spinning them 7% faster than the fronts on full lockup – which helps the GR Yaris turn harder into corners. However, the degree of rear-axle overdrive is constantly adjusted by a centre computer-controlled wet clutch. This lets the car vary power split between the front and rear from 60:40 up to 30:70, with these settings tied to the car's three drive modes – normal, sport and track – selected via a drive mode dial in the centre console. That all sounds very technical, but the result is a car with prodigious traction the moment you mash the pedal.

At a sedate pace, the GR Yaris is surprisingly chilled-out. The controls are intuitive and predictable, with no unnecessary weight for the sake of sportiness. That means the GR Yaris feels at home on urban roads and you won't feel like you're in for a workout every time you manoeuvre the car. Tiny dimensions mean you shouldn't struggle to park in tight spots, but you'll be relying on the standard-fit reversing camera because rear and over-shoulder visibility is poor. If you want all-round parking sensors too, you'll need a GR Yaris with the Convenience Pack, but this can't be specified at the same time as the Circuit Pack, which keen drivers might prefer.

Enough about slow driving, though, because the GR Yaris absolutely shines when you start exploring its immense capabilities. Having this much firepower in such a small, light car is simply intoxicating. You can fling the front end into a corner before stamping on the accelerator, feeling the car's high-tech hardware claw you towards the apex – all at frankly silly speeds. The powertrain's ability to drag the car out of nearly any situation can be enhanced with the optional Circuit Pack with its front and rear limited-slip differentials – although our base-spec car without this option hardly felt lacking.

Refreshingly, Toyota hasn't given the GR Yaris a punishing suspension setup. As you throw the car around, there's actually a touch more body roll than you'll find in something like a Ford Focus ST. Far from blunting the driving sensation, however, it gives you more of a sense of how the car's weight is responding to your inputs. The setup helps the whole experience feel a bit more 'analogue' than some more rounded rivals, which can feel a little detached when driven swiftly.

The well-judged damping also means the GR Yaris rides over rough road surfaces impressively. There's an obvious firmness, so you're certainly going to notice potholes and speed bumps, but the suspension stops the sharpest part of the impact from reaching your spine. This means long journeys shouldn't prove too arduous, although you will have to put up with some engine grumble, plus some wind whistle at motorway speeds.