Photo: Toyota
Have you noticed Toyota's motto is now "Fun to Drive. Again."? After years of making hybrids with CVTs, the Japanese engineers are now looking to bring back driver enjoyment. Motorsport is the doorway, and the Yaris may walk right through it.
Tetsuya Tada, Toyota’s chief engineer of the brand’s sports vehicle management division and the guy that gave us the GT 86, says he wants a hot hatch that will help sell more vanilla cars and spice things up in the context of the return to the World Rally Championship in 2017.
When asked by CarAdvice whether he was thinking about the Yaris subcompact or the bigger Corolla (as in Auris/Scion iM), Tada said he wasn't hung up on names. But the smaller Ford Fiesta ST and Polo GTI were on his target list, as opposed to their big brother.
Because Toyota has mainly been preoccupied with low prices and fuel economy the past decades, Tada was asked if a small, downsized turbocharged engine would be used for the yet undefined hot hatch. To that, he said, "no, big turbo" while also stating that "nowadays we don’t need any all-wheel drive."
This could be the start of something great or just a one-shot deal. Toyota had many attempts to make the Yaris into a powerhouse. In Japan, a model called Vitz GRMN is available. It's basically like an in-house tuning project put together by a racing team. The naturally aspirated 1.5-liter gets turbocharged to produce around 150 horsepower 206 Nm (152 lb-ft).
Arguably, that's nowhere near as powerful as a Fiesta or Polo. There's another project called the Yaris Hybrid-R that offers 300 horsepower from a 1-.6-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine mated to a six-speed sequential transmission and another pair of 45kW motors powering each of the rear wheels. However, that's too complex and expensive.
What we need to remember is that the Yaris' global appeal is waning. The North American market is likely to discontinue it after the arrival of the Scion iA sedan while Europe makes its own version in France. Still, we're fans of Mister Tada's work and hope he can complete his creation by 2017.
When asked by CarAdvice whether he was thinking about the Yaris subcompact or the bigger Corolla (as in Auris/Scion iM), Tada said he wasn't hung up on names. But the smaller Ford Fiesta ST and Polo GTI were on his target list, as opposed to their big brother.
Because Toyota has mainly been preoccupied with low prices and fuel economy the past decades, Tada was asked if a small, downsized turbocharged engine would be used for the yet undefined hot hatch. To that, he said, "no, big turbo" while also stating that "nowadays we don’t need any all-wheel drive."
This could be the start of something great or just a one-shot deal. Toyota had many attempts to make the Yaris into a powerhouse. In Japan, a model called Vitz GRMN is available. It's basically like an in-house tuning project put together by a racing team. The naturally aspirated 1.5-liter gets turbocharged to produce around 150 horsepower 206 Nm (152 lb-ft).
Arguably, that's nowhere near as powerful as a Fiesta or Polo. There's another project called the Yaris Hybrid-R that offers 300 horsepower from a 1-.6-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine mated to a six-speed sequential transmission and another pair of 45kW motors powering each of the rear wheels. However, that's too complex and expensive.
What we need to remember is that the Yaris' global appeal is waning. The North American market is likely to discontinue it after the arrival of the Scion iA sedan while Europe makes its own version in France. Still, we're fans of Mister Tada's work and hope he can complete his creation by 2017.
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