Toyota Yaris
JDM · Toyota
Toyota Yaris: The Subcompact That Replaced the Starlet and Tercel
The Toyota Yaris is a subcompact car Toyota has sold since 1999, replacing the Starlet and Tercel. The name comes from Charis, the singular of the Charites, the Greek goddesses of charm and beauty, and Toyota had sold 8.71 million by March 2020.
The first Yaris, sold from 1999 to 2005, went by Yaris or Echo depending on the market and came as a hatchback or sedan. The hatchback was aimed mainly at Europe and designed at Toyota's ED2 studio in France, based on the Japanese-market Vitz, while the sedan was based on the Platz. The second generation ran from 2005 to 2013. For years the Yaris name was used only on export cars, and Japan kept calling its version the Vitz until 2020.
In North America the story took a turn. Most Yaris sedans sold from 2015 to 2020 and the hatchbacks sold in 2019 and 2020 were restyled versions of the Mazda 2, built and developed by Mazda. Toyota stopped selling the earlier Yaris Liftback in the US in January 2019, and both Mazda-based models were discontinued in the US in June 2020 because of new regulations and slow sales.
The fourth-generation Yaris was unveiled on October 16, 2019, in Japan and in Amsterdam, built on Toyota's GA-B platform, and went on sale in Japan on February 10, 2020. The name now also covers the Yaris Cross crossover. The performance version is the three-door GR Yaris, built by Toyota Gazoo Racing as a homologation model for the World Rally Championship and first shown at the 2020 Tokyo Auto Salon.
