NEW Toyota GR Yaris in-depth review – is it REALLY that great? | What Car?

You know sometimes you just want to get where you're going, you're tired and you want a drama-free ride that will never happen if you buy one of these, welcome everyone to the Toyota GR Yaris, possibly the craziest greenhouse ever. Released in the last decade, if you're any kind of car fan you'll have already heard a lot about this and have probably read or seen some

review

s that suggest it's more or less the second coming, but we're not looking for hype here. at a car we only do direct and honest car

review

s, so is this

really

as good as you've been led to believe?

Well, that's

what

we're going to find out in this video, but before we start, if you're not already subscribed. to the channel, do so and if you want to buy a new car we could save you quite a bit of money so click the link at the top of the screen to head to the deals section of our wattcard website. com, having watched this video, obviously let's start with the elephant in the room because this is a

toyota

yaris

that starts at £30,000, the ford fiesta st, which is another hot hatch the same size as this pit that starts. at £23,000, so

what

the hell is going on?

The first thing you need to understand is that this isn't

really

a

yaris

at all, it has the front end of a yaris but it is attached to what is effectively the rear end of a corolla. Now, the reason Toyota has done this is because the rear suspension design on the larger Corolla platform has made it possible for this car to have four-wheel drive. You may have noticed that there are no rear doors and the standard Yaris is only a five-door, remember. and the whole look of the car is very different, plus you have these swollen wheel arches here, the front of the car looks a lot less demanding and there is also a carbon fiber roof which is partly to save weight but also to lower the weight of the car.

In fact, the center of gravity not a single body panel of this car is shared with a regular Yaris and the bonnet, doors and boot lid, or are they all made of aluminum to save even more weight, so why Toyota has gone to so much trouble and Not only did we equip the regular Yaris with a big engine and a stiffer suspension, well, it all comes down to rallying. To enter a car in the world rally championship it must first be homologated which essentially means it must be based on a model sold in sufficient numbers for the general public and in the 80s and 90s the sales number requirements were quite modest, so manufacturers used to effectively build the ideal rally car and then sell a handful of production versions of it to comply with the rules, which is why cars like the original Ford RS200 Peugeot 205 T16 and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo some Once they hit the road in the first place, it doesn't happen much anymore, partly because the sales requirements are higher and partly because rallies are no longer as popular as they used to be.

Modern rally cars are mostly based on regular models like the Ford Fiesta, so the fact that Toyota decided to build a homologation special to participate in rallies is the main reason why there is so much hype around the GR, although it won't actually have a co. -recovering due to a combination of coronavirus and the rule change to only allow hybrids, but that's another story now there are three different versions of the gl, there's the level car which costs £30,000 and there's a convenience package model which costs around £32,000 that gives you some extra creature comforts and then there's the £33,500 circuit pack model we have here, this car has bespoke 18 inch forged alloys with extra sticky michelin rider mount 4s tires , it also has a different suspension than other versions of the gr and has limited slip differentials both front and rear, it really is what you want, don't worry, we'll go around it in a minute, but before we do, let's take a look. quick look inside.

Here now, the entire look of the interior is very similar to what you'll find in the regular Yaris and when you consider the much higher price of this car, not good news, there's a lot of hard plastic on the dashboard. the doors here and compared to a golf gti that costs the same amount of money as this car it doesn't feel particularly high end there is a bit of red stitching on the steering wheel on the shifter on the seats and a bit more on the handbrake too, but otherwise there is a lot of gray here on the subjective seats, these are completely different to the ones you have in the normal yaris, they keep you in place much better in the corners, but they are also Surprisingly comfortable on long trips.

The only thing you may not like is that you sit quite high, so this is not the conventional sporty driving position that you find yourself in, for example, in a Honda Civic Type R, where you sit lower with your legs. more uptight, but there is nothing wrong with sitting high up and in fact the ergonomics here are very good, the gear lever is easy to reach, there is also plenty of adjustment on the steering wheel and in fact how you sit At the top, you have a good view, which is good. What happens when you're hitting the kind of speeds this car is capable of with the infotainment system, well, it's not brilliant, but you do get an Apple Carplay and Android Auto smartphone that mirrors a standard so you can avoid effectively Toyota's own operating system and use your phones instead.

The fact that the screen is mounted nice and high on the dash makes it easy to see. Choose the convenient package model and you'll get a more powerful JBL sound system. You'll also get a built-in sat nav. I'm not. I'm really sure why you would need that nowadays because you can use Google Maps or Waze on your phone and mirror it on the screen. You also get more safety kit here including rear cross-traffic alert and blind-spot monitoring, plus front parking sensors. and also a front screen. Now the regular Yaris isn't very spacious in the back, but hey, even when you've managed to get past this ridiculously tight space here, you won't find much space here at all. and the boot, which is tiny and smaller than that of a Fiesta st, let alone other hot hatches that are available for this kind of money, we managed to fit only three carry-on suitcases under the partial shelf, but the question is: do you really care?

Not having much space - it's not like it's a two-seater folding roof or anything - you can still carry four people and some luggage, and the fact that it's quite small is a good thing when driving on tight country roads how are you doing. Remember that some of the best hatchbacks of all time, such as the Peugeot 205 GTI and Renault Cleo Williams, were small by modern car standards and it's not like the roads have widened in the last 30 years, but they haven't. It's just about size, this car does it right. It's incredibly well designed across the board, let's start with the engine, it's not that big, it's only 1.6 liters, but it has a pretty big turbo belt so it makes 257 brake horsepower.

Toyota quotes a time of 5.5 seconds north of 62, which is really quick by hot hatch standards, but get this the other day at our proving ground, this car managed nothing like 62 in 4.6 seconds and before Make you think that Toyota sent us a car that has been played with and has much more power than it is supposed to. I have the gr that can't do anything up to 60 in second gear, while to get to 62 miles per hour or 100 kilometers per hour, which is the acceleration time most manufacturers quote today, you need to shift into third gear and that explains a lot of the difference now.

To be honest, when you first start the engine it sounds a little disappointing, partly because it's a three cylinder, but it loves to be revved and when you rev ​​it above 3000rpm it sounds

great

and I know some of the noise is it comes through the speakers rather than genuinely coming from the engine, but I don't really care because it doesn't sound fake and it sounds a lot more exciting than a Civic Type R, for example, and the thing is, it's all-wheel drive there. . No problems with traction even on wet roads in really quite cold weather these days.

The Type R has more power, yes, but if you try to use it all in these conditions, the wheels will spin a lot. Now you can change the power distribution between the front and rear wheels by turning this little dial down here, if you switch to sport you get 70 cents to the rear and in that mode if you accelerate hard coming out of a corner you can really feel the back of The car that helps you drive isn't some sort of pen-changing hot hatch like, say, a BMW M140i light above, but it just adds another layer to the driving experience that you don't get in vastly outnumbers most other hot hatches, even many with four-wheel drive, and the gr also changes direction brilliantly, so you can really throw it into corners, that's partly because it's actually very light for something with four-wheel drive, but also because the body control is fantastic, the steering.

It's quite heavy, that's something I normally don't like because it can mitigate the feeling of weight that builds up when cornering, but in the GR you always know exactly how close you are to the limits of grip and there's enough precision too. to allow you to be really precise when placing the car on the road. What's not so good, well, the ride is certainly firm. This is the circuit package model. It reminds us of circuit-adapted suspension, but it's not comically firm. like a renault megane trophy for example, and due to the sophistication of the suspension the tire is always in contact with the road so you'll want to jump on the surface every time you encounter a pothole or a drain plug and that It's further proof that this car has been designed to perform very well on British roads, the gearbox is also not as brilliant as the type, but it is still very pleasant to use.

It's actually quite heavy by the most demanding standards, but you get a really nice feeling of mechanical engagement with the car. Although the pedals aren't perfectly placed, it's still pretty easy to hit the accelerator on downshifts to match the engine revs, although you can actually cheat and press this button here and the car takes care of all that for you, but here . There are five more things you might want to know about the yaris gi. All versions of the GR have a standard five-year, 100,000-mile warranty, which is better coverage than you get on the vast majority of other hot hatches in our real-world fuel economy tests.

The GR averaged 32.8 mpg, which is only slightly behind the official government figure of 34.4 mpg. The gr is surprisingly tempting if you're buying with pcp finance, put down a £10 deposit on this circuit pack model and you'll pay around £390 a month for the next three and a half years, which is a lot less than you'd pay for a civic type r equivalent. You will have to wait about 10 months to get your gr if you order one now because supply is limited and demand is really high. strong, that explains why you will find some cars listed in the classifieds whose owners are already asking up to £40,000, apart from the three different versions of the gr I talked about before, there aren't many options when it comes to customization for a £880 Con extras you can have this pearlescent red or pearlescent white, with an extra £585 you get a metallic black or you can just save the money and go for a solid white, so the big question is which gr is really worth all the fuss for once.

This is a car that absolutely is, it's phenomenally good, fun, fast, fun and in fact, if you forget the Yaris nameplate, it's pretty good value for money and better than a Type R. Well , that's a tough question to answer because even though both cars cost about the same. In fact they are very different on a sunny day when the road is nice and dry - on a Welsh mountain road for example the Civic is hard to beat - but on a narrow country road like this, especially in winter, when There is God knows what else wet in the whole world.

On the road I will be taking the gr every day but for a lot more information on the gr visit our website whatcar.com or just click the link at the top of the screen and remember if you want to buy some new whatcar car. com is the place to get a

great

deal thanks for watching and if you liked this video please like and leave us a comment if you want to ask anything about the gl or anything else related to the car and beyond that. see younext time