Living with the Toyota GR Yaris, a homologation hot hatch for £20k

The driving position of my pre-facelift Toyota GR Yaris is compromised, for sure, particularly the way the low rear-view mirror creates a blind spot, and anyone else who drives it notices it straight away, but I’m acclimatised. Also, it’s almost muscle memory now to fire up the engine and hold the lane-keep assist button to turn it off. The Toyota’s system is far from the worst I’ve come across but I think they’re all a blight, finding lines where there aren’t any and jumping in with a finger-wagging wheel jiggle, and unable to distinguish when you’re straight-lining corners on an open road from changing lanes.

What I still haven’t got used to is the wonderful delivery of the little turbocharged engine. I love a triple anyhow, revel in its languid, off-beat character, and the mid-range torque of the Yaris’s is so strong it feels like a 3-litre engine rather than a 1.6. Full boost mid-range really is the engine’s sweet spot; it sounds a tiny bit strained approaching the red line, and if you’re a bit keen on the throttle as it reawakens from a stop-start event you can stall it. But hooked up out of corners on a healthy throttle opening, the Yaris feels poised and mighty, especially in the wet.

> The new Toyota GR Yaris Sébastien Ogier edition is a rally car for the road

One mystery about the Toyota was solved recently. I don’t mind running cars low on fuel and in the case of our GR Yaris I felt compelled to, because while the technical spec says it has a 50-litre fuel tank, all fill-ups so far had seen less than 40 litres go in. I suspected a typo in the spec and so decided to get the remaining range really low on a run back from a photoshoot. I got to the petrol station near home with just 2 miles left on the range and it took a whisker over 40 litres.

This seemed conclusive proof that it wasn’t a 50-litre tank… until we went to Litchfield Motors to use their dyno for our synthetical fuel test (evo 320). To ensure ‘clean’ sampling, we drained the tank between batches, so imagine my surprise when, with the range down to just a handful of miles, almost 14 litres was extracted. So it is a 50-litre tank but the gauge pegs you at 40. Why? Is this the case with all GR Yarises?

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Iain Litchfield offered a theory. It’s a saddle tank sitting over the transmission tunnel, like the one in the Nissan GT-R, and he wonders if the pick-up is unreliable below a certain level. You wouldn’t want any interruption to the fuel supply on full boost in either car because there might be a big, expensive bang from under the bonnet.

On a steady drive since I’ve gone for 40 miles after the fuel gauge and trip showed empty and then got 48 litres in the tank. Driving around on ‘empty’ is a bit like walking on one of those high bridges with a glass floor: you know that it’s plenty strong enough but you can all too easily imagine what could go wrong.

An interesting aside from Litchfield was that when they’re tuning a car on the dyno they only use Shell V‑Power fuel because it’s high octane and consistent in quality, whereas Tesco Momentum, which is also 99 octane and typically less expensive, varies in ethanol content. Litcho should have a T-shirt printed with the slogan ‘I tune cars and know stuff’.

That leaves one more Yaris mystery, and it’s this. The standard-fit sound system is decent, with quality of sound consistent right up to maximum volume, but why is that maximum 63? Not 60, 100 or even 65. Not even Litchfield knows. Theories welcome.

This story first featured in evo issue 322.