The New Toyota GR Yaris Will Cost You £44,250, If You Can Actually Buy One

The recently-updated Toyota GR Yaris is better than it’s ever been, as we recently found out with the help of a frozen Finnish lake. We knew that its excellence would come at a cost, and now we know what that cost is in the UK: £44,250.

That’s the starting price for the basic GR Yaris, which has ditched the original choice between Circuit and Convenience packs, with sales of the old car heavily favouring the former. Should you want the new automatic version, it’ll set you back £45,750.

That’s a hefty jump over the old car which, when it went on sale in late 2020, started at £29,995 (although you’d have been hard-pressed to find one going for that at the time). The nearly £15k jump is down to a few things. Obviously, cars have been generally getting more expensive, but the new version has also been given a stiffer chassis, improved interior and more power – 276bhp, versus the old car’s 256.

Toyota also says that the new GR Yaris will be available in “very limited numbers” this year, and is expected to be “one of the most in-demand new cars of 2024,” code for “we can charge whatever we darn well please and people will still buy them.”

In fact, Toyota expects demand to be so high that you won’t be able to just pop down to your local dealer and choose one from the forecourt. First refusal will be given to existing GR Yaris owners, as well as those who joined the waiting list for the original car before it closed in 2022. These groups will be given the opportunity to be entered into a ballot for one of the UK’s 2024 allocation.

We presume, in the basically impossible event that they don’t sell them all through this method, that any remaining cars will then be offered for sale through regular channels. We’ll bet £44,250 that won’t happen, though.

Toyota has also confirmed that the rally-inspired Ogier and Rovanperä editions are headed for the UK, although we hope you’re sitting down: they’ll be an eye-watering £60,000 a pop. Toyota hasn’t confirmed how many of each of the special editions will come to Britain.

So, in an unsurprising development, the GR Yaris won’t be the bargain it once was, and even if you are prepared to stump that much up for a three-cylinder Yaris, you’ve no guarantee of getting one.

Still, watch them all sell out within a few days. It is, after all, an utterly brilliant car. And hey, could be worse: you could be trying to buy one in France.