New Toyota GR Yaris 2024 review: updates make a great car even better

Verdict

The Toyota GR Yaris is no more relevant than it has ever been – if anything it’s less, and that’s before you get to the higher price – but it is demonstrably a better product regardless. The improved driving position helps, but it’s the combination of an unshakeable chassis and extra punch from the engine that really shines. For pure driver involvement and aural thrills, we’d still rather have a Honda Civic Type R, but as a glorious outlier – a modern-day successor to Lancers and Imprezas of old – the GR Yaris remains in a class of one.

The market for hot hatchbacks has been declining in general in recent years, and the number of supermini-sized offerings has arguably led the fall. Toyota doesn’t seem to have received the memo, though, because three years after stunning driving enthusiasts with the turbocharged, four-wheel-drive GR Yaris, the Japanese brand is back with a new and improved version.

And make no mistake: Toyota really has focused on the weak spots of the old GR Yaris. From the outside you’ll be hard pressed to tell any difference, in fact; there’s some tougher mesh grille to help protect the radiator, for example, but that’s about it. 

Yet inside, the modifications are fundamental enough for them not to have been the work of a minute. You sit lower than before by around a couple of centimetres, and this remedy for one of the original GR’s biggest bugbears required tweaks to the floorpan – not to mention a complete overhaul of the dashboard. The idea, we’re told, is that you’ll feel more like you’re sitting in the car than on it, and visibility should be improved as a result, making it easier to position the car on the road.

As for the oily bits, Toyota has freed up some extra power from the 1.6-litre three-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine, so it now produces 276bhp and a hefty 390Nm of torque. The six-speed manual gearbox has been tweaked too, apparently, although our test is based on miles in a car equipped with the new-for-2024 eight-speed automatic transmission. 

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The four-wheel drive system has revised torque splits in the Yaris’s drive modes (Normal, Gravel and Track) and the suspension has been tinkered with too; there’s a stiffer front anti-roll bar, plus beefier spring rates front and rear. As such, Toyota sees no need to offer the optional Circuit Pack of the original GR Yaris, so it’s been dropped.

The firm has added a couple of special editions to the range, celebrating its rally successes with world champions Sebastien Ogier and Kalle Rovanpera. These get additional modes configured to the tastes of each driver, but they’re a) pretty much sold out already, given that the UK was only allocated tiny numbers of each version and b) astronomically expensive – £60,000 a pop.

Even the regular versions of the car have received a price hike too, mind you, so there’s no getting around the fact that the GR Yaris is a very expensive creation. The manual model comes in at just over £44,000, a rise of more than £12k over the original car’s figure, while you’ll pay an additional £1,500 for the auto gearbox. Still, we’re living in a time when a Honda Civic Type R will cost you almost £50,000, so maybe these aren’t crazy figures for a hot hatch featuring its own, bespoke three-door bodyshell (the original reason for the car was to support the needs of the WRC homologation) and four-wheel drive.

You do feel like you’re better integrated into the new GR Yaris’s cabin, and the view out is definitely better than before. The reworked dash is neat and functional, with everything angled somehow towards the driver, although the fascia – all of the cabin materials, in fact – feel more focused on robustness than any modicum of plushness. That’s not where you’re spending your money here.

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Instead, the GR Yaris continues to offer a curious lineage to those crazy Mitsubishi Lancer and Subaru Impreza homologation specials of old, because all of the joy is in the driving. The revised suspension settings are firm, so you do get a fair bit of communication of what’s going on beneath you. This may be a little wearing on long motorway runs, or around town, we hasten to add.

But start squirting the GR Yaris properly between corners on twistier roads and it comes alive, clinging on and resisting body roll at astounding speeds. The steering is meaty but direct, and while the three-cylinder motor isn’t exactly an aural classic, it delivers huge slugs of power and torque to catapult the 1,325kg car out of bends. It is an astonishingly fast cross-country tool, no doubt, and wonderfully agile, to the point where you’ll be hanging on for dear life long before the car is anywhere near losing its composure.

The gearbox delivers a typical modern-auto approach at lower speeds, shifting up early and keeping revs to a minimum. You’d never call the experience refined, given the amount of road noise coming from the tyres beneath and the gravelly grumble of the three-cylinder engine when it is required to spool up, but the shifts are smooth, at least. When you do want more involvement, you can flick the gearshifter across to manual mode and use paddles behind the steering wheel to control the shifts yourself. This is more rewarding, of course, although the engine remains a less enjoyable creation to rev out than a more typical four-cylinder hot-hatch motor.

Elsewhere, the old GR Yaris foibles remain; its three-door body means it’s a pain to get into the rear seats, which are pretty cramped anyway. The boot is a meagre 174 litres, too – a figure trumped by pretty much every city car on sale in the UK. And while the infotainment system is an improvement on what’s gone before, it’s still frustratingly slow to respond to inputs at times. None of these aspects really bothered the engineers, you suspect – and they’re unlikely to worry customers much either.