OPINION: The GR Yaris’s success proves Toyota went about the Supra’s revival wrong

The GR Yaris is very clearly what buyers want, as evidenced by the fact that it’s sold so well and effectively forced Toyota to confirm it will be an all-but-indefinite part of its line-up. The original hope was to sell 25,000 to homologate the three-door shell for rally use, which was in its mind a wing and a prayer given the manufacturer saw fit to bolster its chances with the weedy-engined RS hybrid in Japan. It ended up shifting over 32,000 over them… and counting.

Why is that? It’s an excellent car, yes, but it’s the story behind it that I believe has impassioned buyers and given them the confidence to invest in it. 

Because a car is an investment, not only as an incredibly expensive mode of transport but as a statement and a reflection of yourself, what you like, what your priorities are and what you believe in.

In the case of the GR Yaris, it’s the expensive engineer’s car, the dream project, the one Toyota had to bite the bullet on when it came to cost and development, with a bespoke engine, thoroughly developed four-wheel-drive system and dedicated three-door platform. Toyota had to pluck up the courage and believe that today’s performance car-buying public would show an interest, in an era where such votes of confidence are few and far between.

We felt seen, we felt heard and we rewarded Toyota for its troubles and invested in our droves, proving that it was right to put in the time, effort and money. The Supra, on the other hand...

After the initial bubble of hype that surrounded the return of the nameplate, sales numbers have tanked, even with the (begrudging) addition of the manual option, with reports that US demand dropped by a whopping 46 per cent in 2023 by comparison to 2022. 

And why is that? Well, while a technically fine car – a pleasing, entertaining and worthy sportscar in its own right – the Supra is the opposite of everything we just said about the Yaris. 

Quite in contrast too, to the circumstances of the creation of its predecessor, which was a tour-de-force of in-house over-engineering, it’s all but a thoroughbred. It’s a product of spreadsheet-thumbing penny-pinching; the desire to capitalise on name caché with minimal investment. To Toyota, the name’s revival was little short of a sweetener in a tech deal with BMW. And no matter how good it is – and let’s be clear, it is a pretty good car – we all know it and we all feel it.

We know that the Supra’s well-known, well-memed family tree is a vote of low confidence. It’s Toyota saying that doing it itself would have yielded diminishing returns. It’s Toyota assuming that we – yes us, the car enthusiast public – don’t care about the details, the fundamentals or the back story and that we won’t show up for a car that’s had the money and the heart of the company put into it.

It’s a hedged bet on us having no barometer for a car’s soul and no appreciation for anything beyond that which is skin-deep. In short, it’s not the best way to go about devising a passion product. Clearly, they were wrong and how cruelly hilarious is it that the best proof of as much sits alongside it in Toyota’s own dealers?

The real stinger is that Toyota had the means to succeed the A80. This is one of the largest, most profitable car companies on Earth tightening the purse strings. So it's also a car that’s left many feeling really quite bitter. You feel bitter when you have to spend money on a new kitchen appliance, not when you want to buy a new sportscar. It’s not the kind of warm fluffy feeling you associate with fun spontaneous purchases.

The proof is in the pudding and the results are as above, cruelly ironic. The expensive Yaris is over-performing and the cheap Supra is under-performing, which isn’t a sentence that should make sense.

So what’s the lesson? If you’re going to do it, do it properly. Don’t take someone else’s C- homework, Google translate it from German to Japanese and assume you’ll have everyone singing your praises. Again, not that we need to tell Toyota this because another project of its own devising, created with the passion, potential and superlative technical know-how of its in-house talent, is leading by example. 

Do we say all this without remembering that Toyota got burned the last time it did a Supra properly? Have we forgotten that the Lexus LFA is a glaring, blazing black hole in ToMoCo’s bottom line? Are we saying the Supra as it is is a bad car? Of course not.

But that doesn’t change the fact that for many, it is what’s inside that counts. That's the inescapable reality and we think part of why out of an expensive Yaris and a cheap Supra, it’s the hatchback with the carbon-fibre roof that’s somehow a bottom line darling; the star turn of the bean counter’s spreadsheets. 

Maybe they should have done the new Supra properly, as a wheels-to-wiring passion project rather than what we got. Imagine the alternate timeline where the Supra used a scalable version of the Lexus LC platform and was powered by a 3.2-litre 540-600PS twin-turbo straight-six, based on a modular scalable version of the GR Yaris’s 270PS three-pot 1.6… Sigh.