We absolutely adore the Toyota GR Yaris here at CT. So much so, that we even named the updated car our 2024 Car of The Year. Really, we don’t think there’s much it needs to improve on – yet Toyota has somehow found a way to produce a much more tantalising version.
This is the GR Yaris M Concept, a prototype which plays host to a brand-new 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Oh, and not only that, but that’s been mid-mounted. Good lord.
Toyota GR Yaris M Concept, front 3/4
It hasn’t been confirmed as a production car but instead this prototype will be raced in Japan’s Super Taikyu series in a bid to “further explore the potential of the GR Yaris”, which sounds a lot to us like Toyota could make it a production car.
After all, it debuted the eight-speed automatic gearbox which it now sells for the Yaris and GR Corolla in that very series, so it has a proven path of testing new mechanical bits there before putting them into production.
If we’re going to be really speculative, are we maybe looking at a testbed for the upcoming new Toyota MR2?
Toyota GR Yaris M Concept, bonnet open
We don’t know anything about the car beyond that, although we have been tracking the development of Toyota’s new 2.0-litre engine for quite some time. We’ve seen it in prototype form with 296bhp deployed in a Hilux for a demo run, although reports in Japan have suggested the engine has been designed to handle as much as 395bhp without any form of electrical assistance.
If it does make its way into a road-going GR Yaris, we’d imagine this to be an extremely limited-run version in the vein of a Renault Clio V6. That’s not a sentence we expected we’d type in the year of 2025.
Watch this space with a very, very keen eye.
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