Toyota GR Yaris Review & Prices

Toyota took no half measures when creating the GR Yaris, because in reality it shares little more than a name, rough design and few parts with the far cheaper, more sensible Yaris. It won the Pleasure of Driving category in the 2021 Carwow Car of the Year awards and was commended again in the 2025 awards because it’s rapid and great fun to drive, if a bit impractical for day-to-day life.

Where the Volkswagen Golf R and Audi S3 are like the sporty accountants who turn up to the parent’s day race in jeans and trainers, the GR Yaris is the professional athlete who’s lined up at the start in their Olympic running kit.

Even at a quick glance you can tell that the GR Yaris is full of sporty intent. It’s one of the only three-door hot hatchbacks on sale anymore, and its big, metal front grille, rakish roofline and enormous, bugling wheel arches mean it looks like nothing else on the road. Only the Honda Civic Type R comes close to the Toyota's almost cartoonish appearance.

The interior received a large update in 2024, where it lost all resemblance to the standard Yaris - bar the badge on the steering wheel. You get a retro arcade machine-inspired dashboard which wraps around the driver’s side of the cabin, and it brings all the infotainment and climate controls within easy reach for you.

Where the pre-facelift car felt a bit church-pewey, the update also brought with it new front seats which drop down low - better for getting a feel of what the car is doing around corners. The new digital driver display is far more useful than the older model’s analogue dials, too, while build quality feels solid.

Space in the back is disappointing though, because the GR Yaris’s low roofline severely impacts headroom and makes it tricky to squeeze in there. The boot is a tiny 174 litres, too, even smaller than in an Abarth 500e, half the capacity of the comparatively-sized Volkswagen Polo GTI.

In addition to its interior space, the GR Yaris does feel a bit compromised around town as a result of its sporty features. The turning circle is a metre wider than the regular Yaris, while the very stiff suspension will have you clenched as you approach a sharp pothole or speed bump. It’s surprisingly pliant over rough roads, that being said.

It’s quite noisy on the motorway, with plenty of wind noise and tyre roar in the cabin, and it always feels a bit fidgety over rough roads rather than settled.

Once you get onto your favourite country lane you’ll forget all about the GR Yaris’s foibles, because it feels like a properly old-school hot hatchback, or even a rally car, which is an excellent thing.

There’s buckets of grip and loads of steering feel, and though you may be tempted by the automatic version for ease-of-use, the manual gearbox is immensely satisfying to row through when you’re on a spirited drive.

Check out the latest Toyota GR Yaris deals to get your hands on this little pocket-rocket, or Toyota GR Yaris lease deals instead. Find a used GR Yaris for sale through our network of trusted dealers, or other used Toyotas if you need something more practical. Carwow can even help you sell your car when you decide to switch.

It’s not officially on sale anymore, but the last GR Yaris cost from just over £46,000 in manual guise, while the automatic was around £1,500 more. They’ve held their value very well on the used market though, and there are still lease deals to be had on as-new stock in dealerships.

The most closely-priced alternatives to a new GR Yaris were the Audi S3, Mercedes-AMG A35 and Volkswagen Golf R, but none of them are quite as exciting to drive as the small Toyota.

A used Honda Civic Type R is a stellar proposition to cross-shop against, because while it’s lacking the Toyota’s four-wheel drive system, it’s another example of a near-perfect, rapid hot hatchback with a manual gearbox and proper old-school charm to it.

An absolute hoot to drive, but you won’t notice the extra power you get in the new model

In town

It might be based on a town-friendly Yaris, but the GR Yaris loses out in urban situations, simply because it’s been designed for the open road, not the local Tesco car park. The turning circle is bigger than that of the regular Yaris — 10.6 metres compared to 9.6 metres — and although you won’t notice all the time, it makes ultra-tight manoeuvres that little bit trickier.

The ultra-firm suspension obviously doesn’t do its best work in an urban setting. It’s actually not terribly uncomfortable, as the damping control of the shock absorbers is so good, but sharp bumps — like a small speed hump — will have you wincing. Mind you, the brilliant high-backed bucket seats in the front do take some of the sting out of the bumps around town.

Visibility is fine up front, but the GR Yaris’ roof slopes down quite a lot at the back — for aerodynamic reasons — and that, combined with a small rear side window, means that rear visibility and your over-the-shoulder view aren’t great.

The updated model’s revised layout up front means forward visibility is much-improved, largely thanks to dropping the infotainment screen down and moving the rear-view mirror up.

The automatic model is a no-brainer if you’re going to use your GR Yaris for a lot of city driving. Compared to the manual’s heavy clutch and shifter, it takes a great deal of the sting out and gives your left leg a rest. It doesn’t reduce the drama much, though, as even with eight ratios to go through the GR Yaris does like to hold on to gears, so you’ll be taking off from the lights with plenty of auditory flair.

On the motorway

You can use the GR Yaris as a daily driver – honest – and it actually has some useful features for commuters, such as radar-guided cruise control. There’s also lane-keeping assist, which helps to keep you centred between the white lines.

There is quite a bit of wind whistle when you’re up to motorway cruising speeds in the GR Yaris and that’s accompanied by rather too much in the way of tyre roar. The firm suspension means that you’ll get some fidget and wiggle on anything but a perfectly smooth surface, but it’s not all that bad, in the context of high-performance cars.

On a twisty road

This is what the GR Yaris was designed for. It is a truly awesome car when you get it onto a good road. The controls, especially the steering, give the kind of feedback from the road that’s increasingly rare these days, while the six-speed manual gearshift is so good — precise and with an oiled, mechanical feel — that you’ll be swapping between gears just for fun. The pedals aren’t placed well for ‘heel and toe’ downshifts (which involves using your right foot to brake for a corner while also blipping the throttle pedal as you change down gears for smoother shifts), but there’s nifty software that will do it for you. It’s also not perfect for hardcore track day shifts, so you have to show some restraint, but that’s getting picky now.

Opt for the automatic and you do lose some of the engaging feeling, but it allows you to concentrate more on the road ahead. And it’s not like it’s a bad automatic experience - the GR Yaris shifts quickly, either when left to its own devices or in manual mode with the driver taking control via the steering wheel-mounted paddles.

Naughtily, the manual handbrake has an automated system whereby when you pull it up, it automatically disconnects the four-wheel drive system, making it easier to do skiddy handbrake turns. Maybe just keep that between ourselves though…

The GR Yaris gets a totally different rear suspension to the standard Yaris. It’s a bespoke setup that actually means that the whole rear structure of the car is pretty much unique, and nothing like a standard Yaris. The suspension is firm, of course, but out of town at higher speeds it smooths out, so you’re not jostled and jolted about down a country road. Updated cars from 2024 get minor improvements here, too, based on professional driver feedback.

When you switch the GR Yaris into Sport mode, it doesn’t just make the throttle sharper and the steering heavier, it also puts the four-wheel drive system into a different mode, sending 70% of the power to the rear wheels, rather than the usual 60:40 front-rear distribution, which makes the GR Yaris feel even more responsive in corners. You’d think you wouldn’t notice the difference, but actually you really do — the car feels like it’s being pushed rather than pulled.

There’s also a Track mode, which as well as putting the four-wheel drive into a perfectly symmetrical 50:50 front-rear split, sets the GR Yaris into fully-epic form, allowing you to hook up to the apex of a corner like a racing driver, and then feel the four-wheel drive system just hauling you up and out and down the next straight. Probably best kept for track days though, eh?

Either way, the brakes are excellent — 356mm front discs with four-piston calipers, and those discs are grooved and ventilated too. Again, there’s lots of feel and plenty of ability to haul you down from high speeds, and it all adds up to a car for which you’ll get up early on a weekend just so you can go out and enjoy it on a quiet road. It’ll still be a quiet road though as the exhaust note is nothing special, and Toyota has tried to compensate for that by piping fake engine noises into the cabin, which is only partially successful at best.

The little 1.6-litre three-cylinder engine needs revs to work properly — it’s a bit sluggish to respond at lower revs — but once you get it running above 3,200rpm it just races to the redline. It probably helps that thanks to an aluminium bonnet, doors and boot as well as a special rear bumper made out of thinner, more flexible plastic, the GR Yaris weighs in at just 1,280kg (1,300kg in the automatic) — not half bad for a four-wheel drive high-performance machine. For reference, the regular Yaris is around 1,100kg, depending on the version.

Up front, the GR Yaris is practical enough for day-to-day use, but it’s a different story in the back as the rear seats are almost useless and the boot is tiny

Space in the front of the GR Yaris is just fine. The big high-backed bucket seats don’t rob too much space — and you don’t sit quite so high as you used to. The new dashboard design brings a more useful tray ahead of the passenger, which is now big enough to place a phone, and comes with a handy USB-C slot for charging.

There are also useful, if slightly narrow and cheap-feeling, door bins and a reasonably-sized glovebox. The driving position is excellent — aside from the fantastic high-backed seats there’s a reach and rake adjustable steering wheel too. One annoying note is that the handle to release the door is kind of buried in an awkward, circular plastic bit of trim on the door, which makes it hard to get at.

Space in the back seats

The GR Yaris was doing so well up until this point. Remember that we said Toyota had made the rear part of the GR Yaris’s roof lower than standard for aerodynamic purposes? Yeah, well that’s ruined the rear headroom. Most adults are going to find that their head is brushing the roof lining, and there are only two seats in the back — the middle seat has been replaced by a small, shallow storage area and there’s no centre rear seatbelt. The back is made worse by the fact that the rear side windows are tiny, and the big front seats rob most of your forward vision.

It’s just not a nice place to be. Legroom is pretty tight too, and the three-door layout makes getting in and out tricky, not helped by the fact that only the passenger seat tumbles forward to allow you in and out. Only the backrest of the driver’s seat moves and neither seat will return to the same position as you started in. It’s just not a practical car — if you need a fast hatch that comfortably fits people in the back, look at a Volkswagen Golf GTI or a Skoda Octavia vRS.

Boot space

The regular Yaris has a fairly average boot when compared with similar-sized cars, but at 286 litres it is at least tolerably practical. Not so the GR Yaris. Toyota has simply not compromised when it came to the design of the rear suspension or the position of the rear differential for the four-wheel drive system, and the penalty for that focus on performance is a tiny boot.

You get just 174 litres — a Ford Fiesta ST might have less power and only front-wheel drive, but you get a 292-litre boot so it’s a far more useful day-to-day proposition. And the Hyundai i20 N gets 352 litres – cavernous by comparison. It’s not much more money for the Golf GTI, which gets 381 litres.

That sloping rear roofline doesn’t help when you fold down the back seats, as although they do fold properly flat, there’s a small boot aperture and another big lump where the rear roof meets the rear pillars so loading up bulky items is just a no-no.

The overhauled interior is way more functional than before, but Toyota’s infotainment system is far from the best there is

Changes to the outside of the updated model are minimal, but Toyota has jumped all in to overhauling the interior. There’s a completely new dashboard design that’s nothing like the one in the regular car. You get a boxy shape that comes up from the centre of the car then passes along in front of you.

It’s somewhere between a retro ‘80s look and what you get in a modern rally car, with the latter being no surprise because the new cabin layout comes from feedback from Toyota’s professional rally drivers, meaning everything is angled towards the driver and falls easily to hand.

Behind the steering wheel is a new 12.3-inch digital instrument display that works really well. The information and layout change depending on whether you’re in Normal or Sport mode, with the latter prioritising the rev counter so it’s easier to know when to change gear.

Beside that is the infotainment screen, which sits lower than before to improve visibility out of the window. It’s fairly quick and responsive, but nothing special – though it is now closer to you so easier to operate on the move.

The outgoing model feels a bit less special. The materials aren’t quite as nice, the infotainment display is rather plonked haphazardly atop the dashboard, and there are old-school analogue dials.

There’s just the one engine option, but that’s no problem because it’s a cracker. You get a 1.6-litre, three-cylinder, turbocharged petrol engine that makes 280hp; about 20hp more than the pre-facelift car.

In truth, you can’t really feel the difference when you put your foot down, but during our testing we found that the new car was exactly one whole second quicker from 0-60mph, completing the sprint in five seconds flat. The automatic version posted an almost identical time, but was quicker over a longer distance because the gear changes were much faster.

Because of this, the automatic is actually the better option if you plan to use the Toyota GR Yaris as a track car, because it will help you post the fastest lap times. You can also focus on your driving more without having to worry about manually changing gears.

However, the manual is the more involving driving experience and is therefore more fun for driving on the road, where saving a few tenths through a corner is irrelevant. Either way, you’re sure to have a big smile on your face when pressing on down your favourite B-road.

Manual cars are the more economical of the two, offering around 32.5mpg compared to the auto’s 29.7mpg. You’re unlikely to notice a big difference in day-to-day driving, while both cars are in a fairly high band for road tax.

You’ll need to pay the luxury car tax if your car is between two-six years old, and company car drivers are better off in a hybrid or electric hot hatch as the GR Yaris sits at a high rate for Benefit-in-Kind payments, too.

The standard Yaris gets a full five-star crash test rating from Euro NCAP, including an 86% rating for adult occupant protection, which is good for a small car. The GR Yaris hasn’t been tested separately, so we don’t know if its unique construction and modifications have made any major differences in crash safety compared to the standard Yaris, but it’s reasonable to assume that it’s in the same ballpark.

The specification for the new model has not yet been confirmed, but the outgoing car came with plenty of safety equipment as standard, including pre-collision emergency braking, lane-keeping steering, radar guided cruise control, road sign recognition, auto-high beam lights, ISOFIX for the two rear seats (although good luck getting a bulky child seat back there…), vehicle stability control (which can be entirely switched off if you want), and a tyre pressure warning system.

Toyota came 14th out of 31 manufacturers entered into the 2025 Driver Power survey for owner satisfaction, which is a surprising result for a brand that’s known for solid reliability.

The GY Yaris is a specialist model with lots of bespoke parts, so you’ll need to be aware that those can be reliability weak points, especially if the car is being driven hard on track days.

There have been reports that the GR Yaris’ four-wheel drive system can overheat under heavy load (such as a long track day) and when that happens it will disconnect drive to the rear wheels, leaving you with a front-wheel drive 261hp Yaris… If it does happen, the system should reset once it cools down, but obviously it’s a concerning point for wear and tear.

Toyota, incidentally, recommends that you change the GR Yaris’ engine and transmission oil twice as often if you’re regularly doing track driving. For what it’s worth, Toyota has upgraded a bunch of mechanical items that were prone to damage or wear for the newer model, so the hope is it would be more reliable.

The GR Yaris has also been the subject of a specific recall for its front-facing collision warning and automatic braking system because the radar unit may not have been properly calibrated before it left the factory. This affects cars built between May 2020 and August 2021.

Every new Toyota comes with a standard three-year warranty, and if you keep it serviced with a Toyota main dealer, that warranty automatically extends each year for an extra 12 months and 10,000 miles, until you hit the ten-year mark, or exceed 100,000 miles.

However, there is an exclusion clause in the warranty for “Vehicles which are used for races or other associated track driving” so you have been warned…