The Toyota GR Yaris Now Costs Over £90k In France

We rather like the Toyota GR Yaris. In fact, lots of people do. One group that doesn’t, however, is the French government. Yep, even though you can now buy an Ogier Edition GR Yaris, which features several French flags in honour of France's second-best rally driver named Sébastien, buyers of the updated hot hatch from his home country are going to be hit with some serious price hikes.

Toyota has just announced French pricing for the facelifted, 276bhp GR Yaris. Its list prices are €46,300 for the manual version and €48,800 for the new automatic. That’s around £39,500 and £41,700, respectively.

That’s a little higher than we expect the yet-to-be-announced UK prices to be, but that’s not quite the end of the story. In France, buyers of certain cars face an extra surcharge based on how much CO2 the car produces. Turns out these charges are quite high.

As reported by French site Caradisiac, a manual GR Yaris, with its emissions of 190g/km of CO2, has an additional €45,990 added to its list price, taking the overall cost to the equivalent of a mildly alarming £78,800. It gets worse for the automatic, which emits 210g/km. That means a €60,000 surcharge, meaning the total cost, at current exchange rates, is around £92,900. As Caradisiac points out, that means an automatic GR Yaris now costs about the same, in real terms, as an Alpine A110 R.

The full €60,000 is automatically added to any car that emits more than 190g/km. That means a BMW M2 will cost £120,000, an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio will run you £131,000, and even a new Mustang comes in at over £100k.

It’s not a huge surprise, then, that Toyota is only planning on sending 300 examples of the updated car to France. As specialised a product and as brilliant a driver’s car as it is, it’s hard to imagine too many more people will want to part with nearly £80k for what’s still, at its heart, a three-cylinder Toyota Yaris.