Toyota GR Yaris father & son review. The ups & downs of running a GR Yaris as a daily driver

well welcome to a new harry's garage video and today's car is this the toyota gr yaris a little car with a big heart that i tested the end of january i first one had it in the garage and i was so impressed i had to have one too so i did a search and i'm very proud to say this is my little gr yaris that i've now had for three months and it's just approached in 3 000 miles now a little bit of backstory i love the story behind it this ikea toyota who um ceo of toyota is his car his project started out as this going to be a rally homologation car and then they changed the rules but he pressed on and put this car into production which has unique bits and parts on it you think it would cost quite a lot of money but no he put it on sale in the uk around the 32 000 pound mark or if you have the circuit pack as this car has around the 34 000 pounds and it's a really special car as i found out when i tested it trouble was a lot of other people realized this was a really special car too so when i rang the dealer he's in oxford he said yep absolutely you put your name down you'll probably get your car in december and i think a lot of other people have discovered this as well and just to check i thought well where else could i check where perhaps there wasn't such a sort of queue around the block and as i phoned the toyota dealer in aberdeen and he said exactly the same thing it was a wait until december time but he said set up a little waiting list in case we get some cancellations some of the cars we've got coming through you never know we might get cancellation i can add your name to the list i said absolutely fine thought nothing of it again until phone went and it was an aberdeen number and he said we've got a gr yaris available a red one and uh i said oh right i'm just in the middle can i give you a call back when we get to the house he says no if i put the phone down i'm just gonna ring the next person on the waiting list and he said if you want it you have to tell me now so i said well um yes and that's how i ended up with a gi yaris that came from aberdeen now it was arnold clark the dealer i was dealing with up there absolutely straightforward it's great to deal with but obviously it was a distance issue and covid was we're all in lockdown at the time but with arnold clark they're very clever they have um sort of click and collect points around the country so on the 11th of march my son charlie gave me a lift over to milton keynes and there was the first time i'd seen this shiny red yaris and i was knocked over with the color i've not seen a gel yaris in red i am so glad i got a red one actually the one up the order i placed it was a black one so anyway let's have a little closer look to this i've done a few changes on it already i should just say this color is called scarlet flare it's quite an expensive option in gi yaris land i suppose 885 pounds i think it was there's a pearlescent white you could have black was 500 and something or you just have a plain white one which is no cost actually basic color but the wheel i couldn't decide what color to go with this i wanted a more of a bronze color and the guy who did the project 8 and the contest is scott at platinum alloys i gave him a call i said what bronze color wheels have you done recently that you think might suit the iris and he gave me a couple of options one for a ferrari ff he done as a standard ferrari color but there was a lamborghini wheel that he sent over and it's for the perfomante had this sort of colour and i said that's bang on that's the color so this is a perfomante gold color i haven't got the code but i think it suits this sort of scarlet flare really well because what i've learned on the gi yaris you get a lot of brake dust there's always black brake dust coming off these wheels an excessive amount something to do with the size of the brakes and the type of pad they use so much as i like the idea of a white or rally wheel which is another option they are permanently coated in brake dust but these when i put i collected the car sent it off with um with the black wheels they changed them the car stayed with them until they were painted and when i first saw it i just thought it was absolutely bang on it's not too showy it sort of adds a richness to the look of the car and i still like them two months old which is always a good sign now sorry the other thing about the gia yaris i think people forget is just how high the car is for a little car gr yaris it's really quite high and if i sit in there i notice my eyes are just above the sort of gr logo which is about well it's about there so if i do this on here and then walk over to some of my cars and just to give you a sense of how high you sit in a gi yaris well compared to the espada what i'd have to take the sunroof out and poke my head out to get anywhere near the height that i'm viewing the road from even on the of the project seven i'm above the windscreen header rail so you are that much higher in the gi yaris and i think this is a good thing because when you're driving um down b rows or in the uk on a roads and stuff you want visibility so you've got the same sort of visibility as you get on a motorbike or an suv or something like that so a lot of people are looking at lowering the seats in this car but i think they're a good height because it just suits the sort of driving we do on a and b roads as you can see here i can see out the other thing if the seat was too high i've got a helmet here if i take it on a track day i can put a helmet on sit there quite happily and there's space above the helmet so one thing i've discovered over the last three months i quite like the seats and i quite like my driving position in here what i didn't like was the position of the mirror a normal yaris is about there the mirror is there and you've got this tiny little gap and everything is sort of when you're roundabouts and things like that you just don't have the visibility you expect to have i discovered there's a great forum for gr yaris called gr yaris and if you google that there's some great tips coming through from owners of the car one of them was you can do take a file to the mirror and basically there's this strut here i don't know if you can see that you want to come in there's this strut here and if you file it away you can move that strut higher that then places the mirror that much higher and you think well that won't make a lot of difference i can promise you it does i've gained about two centimeters here i cannot get my fingers in between the top of the windscreen surround and the mirror is that tight to the top there and it just opens up an extra bit of visibility and now the mirror isn't really in the in the way anymore another thing we've learnt on this car is the rear seats they're a bit useless really because of this plunging roof line it's a little bit of a black hole back there the seats don't tip forward very easily and it's all a bit tricky to get into the back so what we've ended up doing if you tip the seats down on your gr yaris you actually get a perfectly flat floor and we've ended up using this like a bit of a van and so the seats flat floor and i've got this load bay protector which i think came out of the x5 and we've had all sorts in there we've had wheels taking the bins out just stuff but with basically the gi harris has turned into a bit of a van for us now i keep saying we about this car because it doesn't actually live in the collection here it lives outside the house because i thought it's a toyota yaris we can all use this the whole family can use it so i insured it for everyone to use what's actually ended up happening is me and my son run around with it almost 95 percent of the time so i thought and this one it'd be quite useful to get my son charlie to join me he's 25. he has a different opinions on car sami because he's a young whipper snapper and i'm an old fart so he's gonna i'm gonna drive this up up to my favorite bits of road charlie's gonna join us there and we'll talk a bit more how we're getting on living with this gr yaris right this is just in normal i as you step in the car i haven't adjusted anything yeah i know it's sort of piped into the cabin but the little sort of whistle of the turbo and the three-cylinder sort of sound from the engine is quite addictive i have not gotten bored of that at all nor have i got bored of the little stubby gear change here that's lifted up on the console so it's nice and close to the wheel the thing about this gi yaris that fascinates me is it is basically a hand-built card specialist facility within the toyota empire it's where they used to build the lexus lfa particular plant and this car is not constructed like any other yaris it's done in a cell it doesn't go down a silver conveyor and someone bolts the wheels on and it moves on to another station no it's built in a cell like you build the really bum really handmade one-off special editions it's how the jaguar project 8 was built and it means a team assemble the car and it takes 10 times longer to assemble a gr yaris than it does a normal yaris that costs and it doesn't compute with the selling price of this car and the volume they're building so 25 000 cars was the initial target and that was all borne out because it was a wrc homologation car and that's how many they have to build but they stuck to 25 000 they probably did all their internal sums on 25 000 anyway when they changed the rules for wrc cars and therefore it doesn't actually compete anymore but what are they going to do because they've had such demand for this car particularly in japan germany and the uk uk was only just to get like 1500 cars i don't know how many have come in i know they've snatched a few from some other markets french etc now one thing i will put back on is the stop start it drives charlie around the twist so i'll put that on and i will press imt imt means it blips the throttle as i down change and it's actually quite good it's not the easiest car the heel and toe in this car but it's got it built in electronically anyway but yeah going back to those build numbers how are they going to manage it with this sort of demand because it's been after after release they obviously didn't expect the demand they were going to get for this car and as soon as it appeared it was winning every test and there was a queue of people you know that's why the waiting list built up but are they going to build more than 25 000 it must be a dilemma for toyota because they don't make any money on this car i'm absolutely convinced they don't make any money you cannot build a car with that amount of man-hours with a carbon roof that's glued in with additional weld points all sorts of things that just lose your money this again ikea toyota nodding it through i wouldn't be surprised if they were losing up to ten thousand pounds a car on on this car in in for everyone they sell if you put 25 000 cars that's 250 million pounds lost yeah the numbers soon rack up even if it's 5 000 a car loss it's 125 million pounds on 25 000 cars so why would you build any more well the reason is the halo effect has really put the spotlight on toyota they can build really exciting cars as well as toyota prius which aren't exciting but are well engineered and it keeps people within the company generated you know these they love building these cars engineers they're all car crazy people normally and this is just what they want to work on now and when we look at the future are they ever going to be able to do a gr yaris again we are in that little window unfortunately when these cars the legislation is just not going to allow it you know you think may 22 we've got speed limiters support coming into cars and then you've got euro 7 engine rex coming in in probably 2025 where you can forget about trying to build a 260 horsepower three cylinder 1600 cc in rally weapon like that it just doesn't happen under euro seven ranks and it's all got all as you saw there lane departure etcetera which i can turn off at the bottom of the wheel it's got all that stuff that will see it through to 23 24 so i think they will build some more here we go up by a little bit we go proper push ah it's just it's just a fun car as you'll see in the moment but i don't think they're going to build very many more of them over the 25 000. now suddenly gonna do a hundred thousand of these never gonna be that sort of number it's gonna be maybe another five eight thousand cars maybe they do an evo maybe it'll go up another 10 000 pound list price or something like that which are going to be fantastic if they do it'll still be a very special car the base car because it's there's not much more they can do you can't get that much more power from that engine you can't reduce its curb weight that much more so i don't mind owning this one the thought there might be a better one and it's only speculation on my part and it might be incremental improvements rather than a full-on yaris gr yaris ii and what i'm going to do now is just charlie's just up here he's waiting for me he's going to jump in the car and then we'll talk about this car how he sees it as a 25 year old different to me he's actually done more miles probably in this car so he's got quite a lot of experience and he drives all sorts of other stuff so he's very lucky in the role he's got an excellent job there where he drives everything you can name and see what he thinks what he's got to say on this gr the harris hi charlie hello hello i'm driving your car you are yeah well i'm lucky yeah you're you've done better with this car than me every time i come home i'll tell you harris strangely it's disappeared yeah yeah how many miles you've done it done two and a half so you know just over 2 600 probably done 1800 to 2. it's not right it's all gone wrong but what's the longest journey you've done in it i've come back from cornwall in one right but that was cornwall on a friday in the lovely sun so it was changeover day and it took seven hours to get home so oh right oh in bank holiday weekend would you like holiday weekend on a friday yeah not the time to be not bad and the gi yaris didn't really score on that the dynamics weren't tested at any not really not at four miles an hour drawing past stonehenge oh no it's not really yeah it was painful apart from that what was it like on the motorway um it's not too bad i had a car for them someone in the back as well so oh really yeah yeah we were three up uh and it wasn't too bad to be honest i think once we had music we had music going uh so that sort of drowned out road noise right yeah i think that's one thing we ought to know we the road noise never disappeared and it's got actually noise cancelling special speakers in here but it can't yeah it can't do anything about the road noise that's just permanently there and you need you know you have the music on or whatever or you're on the road you forget about it but if you're with conversation like we are you notice yeah don't you you do notice when you haven't got radio or anything on or not on the phone and you're all like nothing playing and you're doing 60 miles an hour you sort of i have found myself saying to myself this is a noisy car yeah it's sort of the only sort of equipment is like gt3 porsche road noise it is getting there isn't it and i remember in litchfield he said when he put it up on the ramp they couldn't get over all the subframes that bolted directly to the body so it's you know yeah because it's a homologation special that's what you do road noise wasn't to requirement very high up there when they were developing it sort of understandable yeah and you've got on all right with car playing yeah well that's the thing i just plugged my phone straight in yeah it just sort of works so so it means that that circuit pack option oh yes when you don't get the map when you feel the high pressure yeah function not available yeah so but does that actually come up with a map if you've got car play does that actually come up with the map if i plug it in and the other thing that annoys me is you've got to have the cable here and the usb port is right here oh right yeah but i think but yeah if i plug it in i just put waze on there and it works right so the the lack of navigation on here doesn't like it that's interesting and then yeah i mentioned in mexico when i did road test what i did think also have the dampers fitted the damper kit i haven't actually done it you spoke to them the other day yeah yesterday actually yeah and that's sort of coming in trips and drabs from nitro right sort it just flies around this sort of so one of the things that i do as soon as i get in like it's now become habit i press imt yeah i hate the stop start so that button gets closed yeah and then the other one is and it's now become part of my muscle memory right and what about spawn track do you bother with that uh sometimes i put it to sport sometimes coming along here you feel as though you should i find you should do that but you don't really notice it in daily driving daily driving but you do actually notice when you put it in sport you know the tight bit up here oh okay you actually can you do notice the rear pushing you round right to get round you shouldn't tell your dad stuff like that but yeah does feel like it does something it's not just right but you're right at the outer limits you need to be pushing on to make that work yeah and uh mpg 29.2 and i've never reset that since we've had it so over 2 600 miles 29.2 mpg which isn't bad really but then it never does journeys that warrants the 30 odd mpg that you do on a motorway this cold never really do motorway trips it literally does roads like this yeah so it's not exactly conducive to a high mpg we are quite lucky where we live that we do roads like this and that's why we own something like this really we all know the sort of the lights and there's any other dislikes that you've come across i haven't really found anything that i'd sort of dislike because at the end of it you kind of have to say well it's a 30 or thousand pound car it's not a 100 or something you're not expecting refinement and you know that the whole budget was spent on everything on the drivetrain yeah oh one thing i don't like actually is passenger seat you're sat so high it's crazy in the past you can sort of get away with the drivers yes and that was the thing that you would say with the driving the driver's seat is it sort of feels high when you first get in and then i think that's why everyone sort of jumped on the scene needs to be lower sort of bandwagon yeah but after like the fourth or fifth time driving i didn't even notice it such a surprise it's got stuff like the radar cruise on it oh yeah that's really nice really works very well just just the last thing you expect in this car the aircraft's really good that comes on really quick yeah that's actually really fast yeah yeah that's good which is a surprising thing with you know save weight by a little condenser that seems good so yeah i grumble about this leads i just don't like the way it's always on show every time i get here there's a phone cable on the show but i know someone who has spoken to guys at oxford car audio yeah and they have done a wireless oh you don't have to plug your phone in so it can be done oh right so you could do it by bluetooth yeah right if you wanted to oh but it's not standard yet i think they do on the supra there's bluetooth on the supra so that was a software update or something okay so i don't know maybe it'll come on maybe yeah very clever why are you while you're turning that around i know i took a photo the service cost i was a bit surprised when i looked at those actually yes seriously you don't realize that they want to check this car out so they want they would like to do carry out six month safety check which is a bit of surprise which is only recommended and it's only 50 pounds but all you're doing is intermediate service which is oil from change that's 6 000 miles so there's a service due on this car every six thousand miles is that the same as gt86 i haven't checked i doubt it i think it's just on the gr yaris and it's a fixed price thing it's 190 pounds and a full service is done every 12 000 miles and that's 375 pounds so if you were running if you were doing 12 000 miles in this you would have to have it serviced twice a year but even if you're doing 6 thousand miles a year they recommend you know a 50 pound safety check in after six months we used to have i mean the poor car before this was your outfit yeah this just feels different sort of space this has it's just because it's a manual you know the temperature of the lightness just has a completely different feel about it but i can't tell yourself it's a 1600 cc engine it just doesn't feel it has so much mid-range grunt in it you sort of sit between four and five and then that's when it sort of like gets all very happy and exciting yeah and you use all the gears because it's not over geared it's not one that's been good for you know amazing co2 on the motorway it's it's they're all usable gears which is good i think second takes it to 62 miles an hour so when you take it on a track day i would love to take up my track day um just because i can't believe the limits it can get to on road and go i'd love to know where the line is because i just it's almost like it doesn't have one right and i'd just be so intrigued to find where it would just suddenly lose it and that's the place to do it i just can't get over that this is a road car at 30 grand and what it can do to really find the outer limits and he was surprised how many times he spun it really yeah and he has a gt3 i'm not saying okay the cameras are on but uh he turned everything off so everything off and all the tracks controls and he said they just spin yeah so uh there's quite a lot of clever stuff going on but he was he was out there to find his outer limits oh good i'm so glad i'm so glad that yeah they exist then yeah yeah they do exist yeah the physics is not you know still because i can imagine a lot of these ending up in bits of british scenery as people try and find them we sort of used to have a lot of subarus and stuff like that as well but yeah you've driven integrally in things i mean yeah where's where's integrale on this yeah i know world's going to be watching so he's really not going to lie to your friend who has an interest but i will say that yeah it's on a different planet i'm really just an integral i wouldn't see which way this wednesday and you know you just think this is 30 000 integral is it going into the stratosphere valley wise okay hasn't quite got the cruise sort of looks of an integrality but it's it's still a hero car um your car is a well cleo trophy yep how about comparing this to a clio trophy they do the same job but they do it so differently and yeah you've got one like naturally aspirated yappy zingy light front-wheel drive loads of visibility because basically what's what 2005 so everything was sort of greenhouse don't worry about these wondering great sort of killers yeah but then you just can pull yourself out of anywhere you've driven that on track yeah done track days yeah just terrorized every one day but you do the exact same thing in this you would terrorize things that you have absolutely no right to in this which is part of the fight but yeah that's part of the appeal yeah but this is four wheel drive and it's bigger and it's it's more powerful so it's a different drive but then this is 30 grand in a trophy's sort of 10-ish and i've owned the trophy but we've had the truth in the family for 15 years 16 16 yeah 2005. i suspect this might be around a bit as well unless they bring out an evo version that we can't resist i suppose that's the only thing that would tend me out of this i think you think you'd have a more hardcore one of these that's the dilemma that's why i don't know but i'm thinking that's the only possible reason i could see to get out of this because there is enjoyment to be had from this 30 000 weapon grade crazy b road car that came from toyota and has a five-year warranty sticker in the back window well the sort of equivalent was the alpine a110 wasn't it when they brought the s out and i don't know how well received no yes it has been no it's sort of slightly firmer and this that and the other that sort of defeated slightly at the point that the alpe which was meant to be a little was meant to do like roads like this like really really well i i would own this over the lp personally yes because it's more round it's more usable with this you know being a three-door hatch while i'm gonna have a mid-engine small nimble car there's others i would choose before the lp but uh still a fantastic car but i just like this more anyway there we go we better disappear i hope you enjoyed that video different sort of take but you got to know a bit more about rgr harris and if you did enjoy it well please keep watching because there'll be some more videos coming along very soon thanks for watching

Channel: Harry's garage

Views: 265,382

Rating: 4.9327598 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: kHPtRwwLVhQ

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/spongebob_meth]

Ha, I have the same complaint about the rear view mirror on our subaru. I'm going to have to try that file trick. I like it basically up at the headliner so that I can see under it.

I love his car and bike reviews, such a great channel.

[u/JamPantstheFif]

It's upsetting that this isn't coming to the USA

[u/fatuous_uvula]

It's mind boggling if Harry's estimate of Toyota losing 5000£ to 10000£ per car is accurate. What a steal for the buyers and enthusiasts!

[u/ben1omlinson]

Harry has to be my favourite automotive youtuber

[u/CoyotePuncher]

This is the first I'm hearing of mandatory speed limiters in 2022. Wtf are you guys doing over there?

[u/Llew19]

I test drove one of these yesterday! The waiting list has now grown to 14 months.....

It's a car which gives a fantastic first impression. The steering isn't quite as direct as it was on my Evo 8, but it's nice and light without feeling like it's at all disconnected from the road. Brakes are fantastic, acceleration was sharper than I expected even with 3 people in the car, but the highlight was definitely the gearbox - without a doubt the best one I've ever used (but I've not yet tried an S2000). Short throw without being at all notchy, clutch bites well without being grabby... I don't think there's better.

Annoyingly in the UK you can only go for either the convenience pack or the circuit pack - not both.

[u/goki7]

Love their videos and the way the present.