Part three of a three-part series on three weeks with the GR Yaris: the brand, the drive, the daily.
I ended the last piece with a question: how do all that motorsport feedback loops and the GR-as-a-standalone-brand ambitions hold when the car isn’t doing anything more exciting than the school run and a supermarket car park. I could pretend this is the kind of thing that needs proper, true journalistic rigour, but it was just an excuse to keep assessing the GR Yaris from different lenses.
The honest answer starts with what you give up, and with a month of uninterrupted experience, it starts to add up quickly. This is still a homologation special underneath everything, as I said previously, and the ride doesn’t let you forget that just because you’re doing 50 in a supermarket car park: the suspension that made Piha such a good time is the same suspension absorbing every speed bump and pothole on the commute, and while it is well damped for what it is, it’ll wear on you if you ended up on this car by accident.
It’s loud, too, in a way that’s charming for the first week and just plain loud by the fortieth commute: the synthesised engine note that builds proper theatre on a spirited drive doesn’t switch itself off for the supermarket run, and neither does the road and wind noise that comes with a car this light and this focused. You cannot have it both ways, and at this point every brand knows how to make an isolation pod – if you want to feel something and be engaged, you got to deal with that too.
The rear seats are cramped enough that anyone who regularly needs to carry more than one passenger back there should be looking at a GR Corolla instead, not this. And here we are, back to the door cards, because yes, they are a minor sore spot in this interior, but also on my elbows. Their hard and cheap-feeling plastic never got any better, and with no centre armrest at all, you’re never once given the option to just relax.
The partnership that Toyota has with JBL has led to some very competent implementations – believe me, I know, having listened to a 3h interview with the person responsible, I’m this much of a nerd. Here on the Yaris, it is potentially the least impressive of them all, and that’s to be expected. Hard plastics, a small cabin and a focus on lightness hardly ever lead to impeccable acoustics, and that’s fine. Not the kind of thing to dish this car for, but don’t jump in expecting audiophile quality.
Everything else, though, holds up better than I expected from a car built around a stage, not a driveway. The small tank that caught me off guard in shorter loans turned out not to be a real problem: a 10.1L/100km average across the whole month, including hard driving, is genuinely fine for something this quick. The boot floor sits unusually high thanks to the AWD hardware underneath, but the rear seats drop flat when you need more room. Practicality is okay, not great: enough for my use case but could get in the way of those that don’t travel light.
Heated seats and a heated steering wheel are among my favourite features in cars, and I’m happy to see them here, and wireless phone projection plus USB-C ports get the daily-use brief sorted. The dashboard for the Gen II cars is the one change everyone wants to talk about, and for good reason: the new look is divisive (it took getting used to, but I like it now), and while I’m a fan of actual gauges, the old ones looked very cheap, so the digital cluster does more for you day to day than analogue ever could. The bigger daily difference, though, came from two smaller things that it’s usually the owners that talk about: the interior mirror sits higher than before, and the seating position is lower by an inch, and between the two of them, visibility and finding a comfortable driving position became a non issue.
Even the small footprint pays off here: parking sensors and a reversing camera on a car this size make the tightest city car parks genuinely easy, which is not a sentence I expected to write about something with this much motorsport pretence. What about adaptive cruise control, then? In a manual, no less, and this well calibrated, is not something you see (or get) every day. Big thumbs up.
What actually answers the question, though, isn’t any one feature. It’s what happened every time I took this thing somewhere ordinary: the track pads fitted to this car squeaked at low speed, loud enough that people would look over all the time. Some oblivious normies clearly thought “time to replace pads, pal”, but the odd connoisseur could immediately tell I was dealing with the hardware that led to zero fade during those Piha drives. Once they do clock it, they keep looking, with other GR drivers nodding from the next lane, and one GR Corolla owner who drove across an entire car park just to park his car next to mine, deliberately, because of what it was. I even posted this to the GR owners’ group afterwards (yes, I joined the group), and a handful of other owners had their own version of the exact same story. Talk about community.
That’s the thing the brand piece was actually describing back at the start of this, whether I knew it or not. “Building a community around performance” sounds like a line from a press release until you’ve had a stranger choose a parking spot specifically to be near your car, or watched a Facebook group light up over the same small moment you just had. A homologation special that still does the unglamorous stuff properly — fuel economy, storage, heated seats on a cold morning — isn’t diluting what makes it special. It’s the proof that GR built something people are meant to actually live with, not just admire from a launch-event stage, and that the “usable enthusiast car” GR keeps talking about is a real thing you can park in a real driveway for three weeks and come away still liking.
A loan this long is highly unusual by this industry’s standards, especially for a special car like this. I’m grateful Toyota and GR New Zealand trusted me with one. I covered the brand split and now the car itself, three ways, and didn’t have to pretend about any of it. Cars like the GR Yaris are a rare breed, special from day one, an absolutely future classic. Thanks for the extra time, it was the only way this story could have been told properly, and the seed of me owning one in the future is now properly planted.
