Not only does the (all-wheel drive) Toyota GR Yaris seem to be heaps of fun to drive but the hard data reveals that it can out-perform the current king of front-wheel drive hot hatches, the Honda Civic Type R.

To close out an insane year, Toyota U.K. has pulled the wraps off a GR Yaris that pays tribute to essential workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Revealed at the WRC season closer in Monza, Italy, the car is decorated with a mural designed by a 16-year-old high school student as part of a "Design a Rally Car Livery" art contest sponsored by Toyota and Wales Rally Great Britain.

The car, you may notice, is wearing the unofficial symbol of 2020 — a face mask with elastic straps wrapped around the side mirrors. Along its sides are profiles of a nurse, teacher, construction worker, shopkeeper and a police officer, representing professions that have kept the world turning during the health crisis.

The world is raving about the new Toyota GR Yaris, but had things gone a little differently, it would have been competing, in race guise, in the World Rally Championship.

Anyone who owns the WRC 9 video game will be able to drive the Toyota GR Yaris Rally Concept from the comfort of their homes, on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

We've felt confident saying the Toyota GR Yaris is a cracker of a car, even if an ocean separates us from some actual seat time. That claim has been proven by a new in-car video showing just how fast it can boogie around the Nürburgring. In the footage, a stock GR Yaris is seen whipping around the famed German circuit's tourist segment in just 7 minutes and 56 seconds.

To be clear, that time is for the Bridge-to-Gantry section of the 'Ring, not the full course. Tourists are required to start and finish during a section of the final straight, cutting out about 1.1 miles from the part where many cars reach their top speed. So there's no way to compare the time to a full race or manufacturer test lap, apples-to-apples, but according to most sources a full lap would add about 20-30 seconds to the time, and anything sub 8 minutes is considered quite an accomplishment.

Just as the 2021 Toyota GR Yaris was officially announced for the European market, Autogefühl has put it through a comprehensive test.

Few performance cars have captured the attention of car enthusiasts in 2020 quite like the Toyota GR Yaris. Even less have been so divisive, with some reviewers panning it – like JDM Masters (see the review here), while others are commending it, as is the case with this test by Jonny Smith from The Lake Brake Show who recently had the opportunity to put one through its paces in the UK.

New spy photos fresh from Germany give us yet another look at Toyota's upcoming subcompact hot hatch. While the Toyota GR Yaris is not destined for American showrooms, we're always happy to see Toyota hard at work developing enthusiast cars. Our spies speculate that this particular prototype may be a hardcore GRMN variant of the new baby rally car. 

This prototype boasts canards on its front bumper and an upsized rear wing, suggesting that it might be the GRMN variant, rather than the "basic" GR Yaris. GRMN stands for "Gazoo Racing Meisters of the Nürburgring," after all, so it makes all the sense in the world that Toyota's motorsports development specialists would take their prototype to its namesake road course. 

Toyota’s fourth-generation Yaris became the first car to ace Euro NCAP’s revamped 2020 test program, featuring an all-new frontal offset test that replaces the one previously used since 1997.

Toyota's in-house tuners TRD and Modellista have released aftermarket parts for the new Yaris Cross on the same day the subcompact SUV debuted in Japan.

The outlet Tire Meets Road spotted a leaked document from Toyota on Reddit, sent to the automaker's dealers and general managers in the Southwest region. According to the memo from Toyota's western comms manager, "The Yaris sedan and Yaris Hatchback will not be available for model year 2021. Model year 2020 will be the last year for Yaris. June 2020 will be the last month of production for the Yaris sedan and Yaris Hatchback for the US." Reddit deleted the document, but when AutoWise reached out to Toyota, the same comms manager confirmed the information to the site. And just for good measure, when CarBuzz reached out to Toyota, the response was, "The Yaris sedan and Yaris Hatchback will not be available for model year 2021. Model year 2020 will be the last year for Yaris in the U.S."

So ends a 15-year run in the U.S. of what has, at times, been one of America's spunkiest hatchbacks. In our review of the 2019 Mazda2-based sedan, we called it slow but "pretty entertaining to drive," one of the "better-looking cars in this diminutive class," and were surprised "at how grown up it feels." Such accolades haven't been enough to convince the buying public; since 2008, when shoppers took home 102,328 Yaris models, the Yaris has posted steep declines in all but three years. A burst of sales in 2017, after Toyota absorbed Scion and turned the Mazda2-based Scion iA into the Yaris iA, fell back into substantial declines in 2018 and 2019. Last year, the Yaris hatch and sedan sold a combined 21,916 units. The Honda Fit did 35,414 sales, the Hyundai Accent 25,628. 

The Toyota GR Yaris is perhaps the most promising hot hatch to launch since the Hyundai i30 N, and while it won’t be sold in all markets, it has the right ingredients to put its rivals on notice.

Not long after the Toyota Yaris Cross was unveiled, reports have surfaced that Lexus will launch a new entry-level crossover of its own using the same underpinnings.

Toyota waited over a month to introduce the pint-sized crossover it planned to unveil at the 2020 edition of the Geneva Motor Show. Called Yaris Cross, the smallest and most affordable member of the company's growing range of high-riding models was primarily developed with the needs of European motorists in mind.

Built on the same basic platform as the newest Yaris, the Cross stretches 164.5 inches long, 69.4 inches wide, and 61.4 inches tall, dimensions that make it approximately seven inches shorter, an inch narrower, and about as high as the C-HR. It's less spacecraft-like thanks in part to a tall, upright front fascia, squared-off wheel arches covered by plastic trim, and a relatively high amount of ground clearance. The fully-loaded model defies its entry-level label with 18-inch alloy wheels, LED lighting on both ends, and two-tone paint.