What I suspected was the case with the Toyota GR Yaris has turned out to be about proper.
“It’s no wonder I’ve had correspondence from people with big car collections who drive a Yaris every day,” I wrote in 2021 after spending a number of months residing with one and discovering that it supplied a driving expertise so particular that it could please individuals who might afford reasonably greater than the £29,995 the new hatchback value.
And final month, Toyota offered me with some knowledge backing that up: 48% of GR Yaris homeowners personal one as an ‘additional car’, when the category common is just round 10%.
Many have a GR Yaris “next to a supercar”, mentioned a delighted chief engineer Naohiko Saito. “This is something we’ve never seen before.”
Given this, and that Toyota has bought 100% extra GRs than it had anticipated to by now, it’s little surprise that it has felt emboldened not solely to place the automobile by a facelift however to counsel that it’s going to make it a everlasting fixture within the vary – for so long as it’s nonetheless capable of promote it.
“This isn’t the end of development,” mentioned Saito on the occasion the place I drove a pre-production instance of the facelifted automobile.
“Smells and noise are something we don’t want to give up. We want to make sports cars for the next 100 years.”
By the tip of this decade, although, 80% of recent vehicles bought within the UK should be zero-emissions, and whereas it has solely a 1.6-litre engine, the GR Yaris isn’t a type of.
Still, I reside in hope of a protracted existence – and that Toyota resists the temptation to hike the value an excessive amount of, now that it is aware of the wherewithal of many patrons.
More excitable quotes, though much less glad ones, come from ABC News in Canberra. The Street Machine Summernats automobile occasion has come to city, and with it has come “moron tourism”, in keeping with Mark Richardson, Australian Capital Territory’s performing inspector of street policing.
Australia has some strict anti-hooning legal guidelines – hooning being the phrase for “any antisocial behaviour in a motor car”, in keeping with the authorities – however they don’t dissuade semi-organised burnout occasions.
