The Toyota Yaris: A Car with its Quirks and Charm

I must say that I was quite excited to get behind the wheel of the Toyota Yaris, but my enthusiasm was quickly dampened by some of its quirks. One of the first things I noticed when I started driving it was the low cover, which is supposed to be a convenient feature for accessing the boot. However, living with this car, I found that it can be quite frustrating. The low cover pops up easily, but it also makes it difficult to see out the back window, and removing it is much harder than it should be. The cord that attaches to the plastic hooks has very little play in the loop, making it a real challenge to remove and refit.

As someone who values consistency, I was surprised by some of the car's design decisions. The pedal positioning, for example, can be a bit annoying, with a significant gap between the brake pedal and throttle pedal. This makes heel-and-toe driving more difficult than it should be. Additionally, the car has a steeply raked windscreen, which combined with large sensors for driver assistance systems and a big rearview mirror, creates terrible visibility through the central part of the windscreen.

To mitigate this issue, some people have resorted to turning the rearview mirror sideways to get a better view. This is not ideal, especially when driving on highways or in heavy traffic. My German colleague who reviewed the car with me had a different experience, however. When they took the Yaris out for a spin, they were impressed by its performance and handling. However, they did mention that it lacked some of the features that you'd expect from a modern car.

One of the things that I found particularly useful was the Yaris's Android Auto and Apple CarPlay integration. I use these systems all the time, and it's great to have them integrated seamlessly into the car's infotainment system. However, there is one caveat - the car only has one USB input, which means that you'll need to mount your phone in a convenient location. To solve this problem, I ended up using some special sticky black tack to secure my phone in place.

Despite its quirks and flaws, I have to admit that I had a lot of fun driving the Toyota Yaris. It's a car that's clearly designed for enthusiasts who want to experience the thrill of driving on twisty roads or track days. The car's performance is impressive, and it handles beautifully, making it a joy to drive.

In the coming months, I plan to do some more videos on the Yaris, including some drag racing and group tests to see how it stacks up against other cars in its class. I'd also love to meet some other owners who've perhaps tuned their cars or have some interesting stories to share about their experiences with the Yaris. If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see me do with the car, please let me know in the comments below.

For those of you who are interested in seeing the Yaris put through its paces, I've included a few links below. First up is a drag race against a Honda Civic Type R - it's going to be a close and exciting contest that will give you an idea of just how fast this car can go. Next, I'll be doing a group test with some other cars in the class, including a Mini GP, which promises to be a fun and competitive comparison. And finally, if you're interested in checking out my German colleague's review of the Yaris, I've included a link below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's the new toyota gr yaris like to live with every day can you have one as your daily driver well i thought the only way to find that out was to get and acquire one you know noble act answering the questions that you may well have so yeah i've got a new car and this is it so i've got that in addition to the audi rs6 and the mercedes mga45s and of course my own personal cars the porsche 911 996 the supercharged mazda mx-5 the fiat 126 and the sazika chimney i definitely got a problem haven't i anyway i'm at watson you're watching car wow buying a new car then head to car wow and my team will help you find your next car at a fair price car wow your one-stop car buying comparison site before we start this video i want to just explain something to you i don't actually own this car it's actually on long term loan from toyota like with the rs6 and the mercedes a45 so we can do lots of content on them and find out what they like to live with and even find out some of their faults won't i just said they'd be willing to lend cardwell a car they did say that they had a black one put aside for us but i actually wanted the pearlescent white one which is what this one is now it does cost you 880 quid for this paint the black metallic or red metallic that's 550 quid i don't like the red so much black's good but it doesn't show off the contrasting black panels as well as the white you can also get a flat white which is quite nice but pearlescent white for the win as you're probably aware toyota built the gi yaris to go rallying it's a homologation special they only built 25 000 of them worldwide and it has a rally inspired four-wheel drive system in fact toyota built the four-wheel drive system just for this car very clever actually normally it sends 60 of the power to the front for it to the rear turn this knob here and you can put it into trap mode and it's 50 50 split or turn the other way you go into sports mode and it's 30 70 split so rear drive biased in a yaris which is just utterly nuts this little gi yaris has a 1.6 liter three cylinder turbo petrol engine but it puts out just over 260 horsepower well that's a claim figure actually people have got these on the dyno and they're putting out over 270. and some people are saying well you know 1.6 three cylinder with that much power it's gonna fail eventually it's just gonna struggle and they forget it's a toyota and being a toyota just like with any other toyota you get the classic toyota five-year 100 000 mile warranty and i think even beyond that this car should be fine reason being right this is the pet project of toyota's boss akio toyoda he's involved in this project it would have been a real honor for the engineers to work on it even the people who screwed them together do you think that this car isn't going to be reliable that it won't be built to the highest quality ever because it will be i have no doubt that these will be absolutely fine for well past that warranty period in the uk you have three choices when buying the gi yaris there's the normal version and it comes in at just under 30 000 pounds then there's the convenience pack which costs just over 32 000 pounds and it had some luxury features such as a heads-up display an upgraded stereo inbuilt satellite navigation for the infotainment system front and rear parking sensors and some extra safety kit like blind spot monitoring the next stage is the circuit pack which is really the one you want because it adds loads and loads of mechanical upgrades such as front and rear limited slip differentials you get upgraded lighter forged alloy wheels and they wear michelin pilot sport 4s tires you get some red brake calipers as well and sportier suspension weirdly you can't have the circuit pack and the convenience pack together it's one or the other i don't think it's like that in some other countries but for some reason the uk is a guy from toyota told me it was something to do with the fact that they are right hand drive and it's to do with wiring looms but anyway you should get the circuit pack it costs just over 33 000 pounds i haven't actually tried just the normal car but really if you're buying something like this you're gonna want the diffs on yeah as far as i'm concerned if you're in the uk and you buy any other version of the gr yaris then the circuit pack model you'd lost a plot in fact i'm going to come around your house and hit you with a stick and then quickly drive away again in my yarra so you don't beat me up now some people are saying that this car's too expensive with a circuit pack 33 000 pounds for a yaris though it's not a yaris is it when you think about it you see what happens is they take this car off the yaris production line then they move it to the moto machi factory which is where they built the lfa and then it's basically hand built by expert technicians they did stuff like re-welding it and add extra bracing and loads of different stuff to it it takes ten times as long to put this car together than it does a normal toyota hatchback then don't forget it's got its own bespoke engine all-wheel drive system if you actually look at the cost going into this toyota must be selling it at a loss they probably do some clever accounting where the development cost of this was actually put through the gazoo racing rally team i reckon if they wanted to make a profit the normal way of accounting for a car's cost this thing would be 40 grand maybe even 50 grand and i love cars that are built as a halo project by manufacturers and then you the consumer can get it for much cheaper than it would really cost as if it was a standard car it was the same with the lfa that was built at a loss one of the things i really like about this car is that you've got two stages of stability control so if you have the car in sport or track mode and you press the stability control button once you go into expert settings so it'll let you have some slip and play around but then the safety systems will help gather you up if you get things badly wrong that's good for people like me however if you press and hold the button down you can turn off all the systems completely which if you've got a skid panel like this and it's wet it's great fun now i've put the kind sport setting so i'm sending 70 of the power to the rear wheels and you can be driving along and just go in fact let's get in a second rally style i mean it's just utter nuts i'm doing this in a yard and a bit more handbrake it's so good this is nuts oh yes oh because the barrier there oh you can feel the diff like really hooker so good it is nuts that you can do this in the yaris oh get it round there come on so much fun this car now i know somebody a chat called imran evolve he's going to try and hack the four-wheel drive system because apparently when he was in japan speaking to some of the engineers working on this car they said it is technically possible to make the all-wheel drive system fully rear drive it's going to be interesting to see if he can do that he's got a yaris gr so i'll be working on it to find out how to do that exactly it's just narcissistic one of the real cool features on this car is that it has a carbon fiber roof which is insane on a car of this size however what you see here is actually a wrap the reason they wrap it apparently is because it's very expensive to lacquer it so they just save money by wrapping it however i quite fancy removing this wrap because i've seen someone else has done it and then you get this forged carbon fiber effect like you have on a lamborghini hurricane performante looks really really good now this video might be sounding a little bit like a marketing exercise for toyota but it's not there are some things that i'm not so keen on with this car the first is the exhaust note it's rubbish utterly rubbish i mean you would have no idea how quick and how much fun this car is to drive with the sound of that i suppose the police won't hear you coming now to enhance the actual driving experience toyota does play fake noise through the car speakers apparently it's not that fake so they take the best sound waves from the engine and then amplify them and that's what you hear through the speakers but it's still artificial though i guess it is a bit like electric guitar artificial rather than just fully synthesized could you have been a bit more acoustic though i think so wants an aftermarket exhaust one of the things a lot of people complained about with this car me included is the seating position so the seats are really good and supportive i like them but you just can't quite get low enough in some ways it doesn't matter too much because if you're my height it's fine and being slightly higher is a bit rally car-ish you feel like you've got a better view forward however if you're tall you could struggle for headroom and here's a big problem look really anyone who's average or even slightly tall is really gonna find it annoying if you've got a helmet on they have cut away part of the roof but look can you see check this out i mean do not look at that there is really no room to play with at all just move that out in the way do i look stupid i'll tell you one thing though about this i reckon there's going to be a load of aftermarket seating companies looking at how they can actually lower the seat but the problem is that the brackets are really really high so they're going to have to come up with a clever solution to get the seat low because i don't think it's going to be all that easy to do it when i first drove this car i thought toyota had come up with a neat little solution for the low cover you know light weight here it is however living with it it's a bit of an ass if anything is in the boot that's a bit tall and believe me this boot is not very deep this just pops up like that and it basically means that you can't see out the back window then when you want to remove it it's much harder than it should be you have to undo this but the problem is the way that this cord attaches to these little plastic hooks because there's not enough play in the loop on the cord which holds them in so it really is much harder than it ever should be to remove this now i don't mind too much quotas engineers i spent their time sorting out what this car's like to drive rather than fanning around with stuff like this but it's a real ass to remove and then refit let's just move out of this segment because this is really really dull isn't it oh i've had enough of that do you know what i should be consistent tonight i should be bloody consistent that's the best one yeah for something that's based on a rally car the pedal positioning is a little bit annoying so there's quite a gap between the brake pedal and the throttle pedal and the throttle pedal is recessed slightly so look it's a bit too wide for easy heel and towing normally if i'm heal intake i won't want big silly boots like this look but they actually work better in this car due to that gap you can heal and toe in it it's just not as easy as it should be the gi yaris is steeply raked windscreen combined with a big pod where all the sensors are for the driver assistance systems and a big ass rear view mirror which is way bigger than it needs to be and he actually needs to be big enough that you can see the entirety of the back window and that back window is really small anyway all that combined together means that there's absolutely terrible visibility through the central part of the windscreen now as a result i've seen some people driving along by turning the rear view mirror sideways so they get a much better view out in fact my german colleague which i'll tell you about in a second when they went on the launch of this car toyota had removed those rear view mirrors because they're driving them on track now let's go back to that german colleague you see car wow has just launched a proper youtube channel in germany and if you want to check it out and check out our new presenter just click on that pop-up button up there i've done a link to that channel go check it out it's great this car has android auto and apple carplay use it all the time the annoying thing is though is that you've only got one usb input and it's here so you need to put your phone up there thing is this car is super fast so you end up just having your phone shooting like as you accelerate to the back of the car which isn't good now you could put in a cup holder but you don't want it there because then you've got this wire trailing so what i've had to do is get some of this special sticky black tack that we use for mounting cameras and use it to secure my phone in place up there like brilliant to be fair or those negatives are just listed don't matter all that much when you considered just how much fun this thing is to drive and how awesome it looks now over the coming months i'm going to do lots of different videos on this car it's just locked itself yeah thankfully i've got the key in my pocket in fact i think i just lent against the handle and it's got keyless entry so you can lock and unlock it by just touching the handle with your keys in your pocket could have been embarrassing like i was saying we did lots of videos on this car maybe you have some ideas what would you like to see me do with it some drag races some group tests maybe meet some other owners who've perhaps tuned their cars see what work they've done on them let me know in the comments i will read through them and if you haven't done so already please make sure you subscribe to this channel that way you will not miss a single upload or my next video about the gi yaris anyway thanks for watching i'll see you soon if you'd like to see me drag race to toyota gi yaris against a honda civic type r you can click on that window there or on that window down there to see me race one against the mini gp if you click on that box there you can get a car word so much money you can save on a new carwhat's the new toyota gr yaris like to live with every day can you have one as your daily driver well i thought the only way to find that out was to get and acquire one you know noble act answering the questions that you may well have so yeah i've got a new car and this is it so i've got that in addition to the audi rs6 and the mercedes mga45s and of course my own personal cars the porsche 911 996 the supercharged mazda mx-5 the fiat 126 and the sazika chimney i definitely got a problem haven't i anyway i'm at watson you're watching car wow buying a new car then head to car wow and my team will help you find your next car at a fair price car wow your one-stop car buying comparison site before we start this video i want to just explain something to you i don't actually own this car it's actually on long term loan from toyota like with the rs6 and the mercedes a45 so we can do lots of content on them and find out what they like to live with and even find out some of their faults won't i just said they'd be willing to lend cardwell a car they did say that they had a black one put aside for us but i actually wanted the pearlescent white one which is what this one is now it does cost you 880 quid for this paint the black metallic or red metallic that's 550 quid i don't like the red so much black's good but it doesn't show off the contrasting black panels as well as the white you can also get a flat white which is quite nice but pearlescent white for the win as you're probably aware toyota built the gi yaris to go rallying it's a homologation special they only built 25 000 of them worldwide and it has a rally inspired four-wheel drive system in fact toyota built the four-wheel drive system just for this car very clever actually normally it sends 60 of the power to the front for it to the rear turn this knob here and you can put it into trap mode and it's 50 50 split or turn the other way you go into sports mode and it's 30 70 split so rear drive biased in a yaris which is just utterly nuts this little gi yaris has a 1.6 liter three cylinder turbo petrol engine but it puts out just over 260 horsepower well that's a claim figure actually people have got these on the dyno and they're putting out over 270. and some people are saying well you know 1.6 three cylinder with that much power it's gonna fail eventually it's just gonna struggle and they forget it's a toyota and being a toyota just like with any other toyota you get the classic toyota five-year 100 000 mile warranty and i think even beyond that this car should be fine reason being right this is the pet project of toyota's boss akio toyoda he's involved in this project it would have been a real honor for the engineers to work on it even the people who screwed them together do you think that this car isn't going to be reliable that it won't be built to the highest quality ever because it will be i have no doubt that these will be absolutely fine for well past that warranty period in the uk you have three choices when buying the gi yaris there's the normal version and it comes in at just under 30 000 pounds then there's the convenience pack which costs just over 32 000 pounds and it had some luxury features such as a heads-up display an upgraded stereo inbuilt satellite navigation for the infotainment system front and rear parking sensors and some extra safety kit like blind spot monitoring the next stage is the circuit pack which is really the one you want because it adds loads and loads of mechanical upgrades such as front and rear limited slip differentials you get upgraded lighter forged alloy wheels and they wear michelin pilot sport 4s tires you get some red brake calipers as well and sportier suspension weirdly you can't have the circuit pack and the convenience pack together it's one or the other i don't think it's like that in some other countries but for some reason the uk is a guy from toyota told me it was something to do with the fact that they are right hand drive and it's to do with wiring looms but anyway you should get the circuit pack it costs just over 33 000 pounds i haven't actually tried just the normal car but really if you're buying something like this you're gonna want the diffs on yeah as far as i'm concerned if you're in the uk and you buy any other version of the gr yaris then the circuit pack model you'd lost a plot in fact i'm going to come around your house and hit you with a stick and then quickly drive away again in my yarra so you don't beat me up now some people are saying that this car's too expensive with a circuit pack 33 000 pounds for a yaris though it's not a yaris is it when you think about it you see what happens is they take this car off the yaris production line then they move it to the moto machi factory which is where they built the lfa and then it's basically hand built by expert technicians they did stuff like re-welding it and add extra bracing and loads of different stuff to it it takes ten times as long to put this car together than it does a normal toyota hatchback then don't forget it's got its own bespoke engine all-wheel drive system if you actually look at the cost going into this toyota must be selling it at a loss they probably do some clever accounting where the development cost of this was actually put through the gazoo racing rally team i reckon if they wanted to make a profit the normal way of accounting for a car's cost this thing would be 40 grand maybe even 50 grand and i love cars that are built as a halo project by manufacturers and then you the consumer can get it for much cheaper than it would really cost as if it was a standard car it was the same with the lfa that was built at a loss one of the things i really like about this car is that you've got two stages of stability control so if you have the car in sport or track mode and you press the stability control button once you go into expert settings so it'll let you have some slip and play around but then the safety systems will help gather you up if you get things badly wrong that's good for people like me however if you press and hold the button down you can turn off all the systems completely which if you've got a skid panel like this and it's wet it's great fun now i've put the kind sport setting so i'm sending 70 of the power to the rear wheels and you can be driving along and just go in fact let's get in a second rally style i mean it's just utter nuts i'm doing this in a yard and a bit more handbrake it's so good this is nuts oh yes oh because the barrier there oh you can feel the diff like really hooker so good it is nuts that you can do this in the yaris oh get it round there come on so much fun this car now i know somebody a chat called imran evolve he's going to try and hack the four-wheel drive system because apparently when he was in japan speaking to some of the engineers working on this car they said it is technically possible to make the all-wheel drive system fully rear drive it's going to be interesting to see if he can do that he's got a yaris gr so i'll be working on it to find out how to do that exactly it's just narcissistic one of the real cool features on this car is that it has a carbon fiber roof which is insane on a car of this size however what you see here is actually a wrap the reason they wrap it apparently is because it's very expensive to lacquer it so they just save money by wrapping it however i quite fancy removing this wrap because i've seen someone else has done it and then you get this forged carbon fiber effect like you have on a lamborghini hurricane performante looks really really good now this video might be sounding a little bit like a marketing exercise for toyota but it's not there are some things that i'm not so keen on with this car the first is the exhaust note it's rubbish utterly rubbish i mean you would have no idea how quick and how much fun this car is to drive with the sound of that i suppose the police won't hear you coming now to enhance the actual driving experience toyota does play fake noise through the car speakers apparently it's not that fake so they take the best sound waves from the engine and then amplify them and that's what you hear through the speakers but it's still artificial though i guess it is a bit like electric guitar artificial rather than just fully synthesized could you have been a bit more acoustic though i think so wants an aftermarket exhaust one of the things a lot of people complained about with this car me included is the seating position so the seats are really good and supportive i like them but you just can't quite get low enough in some ways it doesn't matter too much because if you're my height it's fine and being slightly higher is a bit rally car-ish you feel like you've got a better view forward however if you're tall you could struggle for headroom and here's a big problem look really anyone who's average or even slightly tall is really gonna find it annoying if you've got a helmet on they have cut away part of the roof but look can you see check this out i mean do not look at that there is really no room to play with at all just move that out in the way do i look stupid i'll tell you one thing though about this i reckon there's going to be a load of aftermarket seating companies looking at how they can actually lower the seat but the problem is that the brackets are really really high so they're going to have to come up with a clever solution to get the seat low because i don't think it's going to be all that easy to do it when i first drove this car i thought toyota had come up with a neat little solution for the low cover you know light weight here it is however living with it it's a bit of an ass if anything is in the boot that's a bit tall and believe me this boot is not very deep this just pops up like that and it basically means that you can't see out the back window then when you want to remove it it's much harder than it should be you have to undo this but the problem is the way that this cord attaches to these little plastic hooks because there's not enough play in the loop on the cord which holds them in so it really is much harder than it ever should be to remove this now i don't mind too much quotas engineers i spent their time sorting out what this car's like to drive rather than fanning around with stuff like this but it's a real ass to remove and then refit let's just move out of this segment because this is really really dull isn't it oh i've had enough of that do you know what i should be consistent tonight i should be bloody consistent that's the best one yeah for something that's based on a rally car the pedal positioning is a little bit annoying so there's quite a gap between the brake pedal and the throttle pedal and the throttle pedal is recessed slightly so look it's a bit too wide for easy heel and towing normally if i'm heal intake i won't want big silly boots like this look but they actually work better in this car due to that gap you can heal and toe in it it's just not as easy as it should be the gi yaris is steeply raked windscreen combined with a big pod where all the sensors are for the driver assistance systems and a big ass rear view mirror which is way bigger than it needs to be and he actually needs to be big enough that you can see the entirety of the back window and that back window is really small anyway all that combined together means that there's absolutely terrible visibility through the central part of the windscreen now as a result i've seen some people driving along by turning the rear view mirror sideways so they get a much better view out in fact my german colleague which i'll tell you about in a second when they went on the launch of this car toyota had removed those rear view mirrors because they're driving them on track now let's go back to that german colleague you see car wow has just launched a proper youtube channel in germany and if you want to check it out and check out our new presenter just click on that pop-up button up there i've done a link to that channel go check it out it's great this car has android auto and apple carplay use it all the time the annoying thing is though is that you've only got one usb input and it's here so you need to put your phone up there thing is this car is super fast so you end up just having your phone shooting like as you accelerate to the back of the car which isn't good now you could put in a cup holder but you don't want it there because then you've got this wire trailing so what i've had to do is get some of this special sticky black tack that we use for mounting cameras and use it to secure my phone in place up there like brilliant to be fair or those negatives are just listed don't matter all that much when you considered just how much fun this thing is to drive and how awesome it looks now over the coming months i'm going to do lots of different videos on this car it's just locked itself yeah thankfully i've got the key in my pocket in fact i think i just lent against the handle and it's got keyless entry so you can lock and unlock it by just touching the handle with your keys in your pocket could have been embarrassing like i was saying we did lots of videos on this car maybe you have some ideas what would you like to see me do with it some drag races some group tests maybe meet some other owners who've perhaps tuned their cars see what work they've done on them let me know in the comments i will read through them and if you haven't done so already please make sure you subscribe to this channel that way you will not miss a single upload or my next video about the gi yaris anyway thanks for watching i'll see you soon if you'd like to see me drag race to toyota gi yaris against a honda civic type r you can click on that window there or on that window down there to see me race one against the mini gp if you click on that box there you can get a car word so much money you can save on a new car\n"