Toyota Yaris, the Top Car of 2020
Toyota has transformed the Yaris into a worldclass small car that is packed with technology and is fun to drive. We reckon that makes it the Top Car of 2020, writes Damien O’Carroll.
As we stand here in the smouldering wreckage of 2020, looking back on what has been an exceptionally weird and unsettling year that saw a global pandemic, a brutally divided United States election and the loss of both Eddie Van Halen and Darth Vader, we’re going to throw something else weird at you: Stuff Motoring’s pick for our overall Top Car award this year is the Toyota Yaris.
That’s right; your nana’s car is the top car we drove in 2020.
To be brutally honest, no-one here thought we would ever write the words ‘‘The Stuff Top Car for 2020 is the Toyota Yaris’’, but that just adds to all the other stuff we never thought we would see, hear, say or do, but did in 2020.
But wait, as they say on the telly, there’s more – the Yaris also took out the Top Compact/ Small Car category and the Top Hybrid category for good measure.
And it thoroughly deserves the titles as well – it really is that good.
And given Toyota’s run of late with some truly impressive models like the new Corolla, RAV4 and Supra, which are actually interesting and engaging, it probably shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that the new Yaris is very good indeed.
Toyota has included its excellent Safety Sense driver assist package in every single model in the lineup, which means that even the entry-level $25,990 Yaris GX comes with adaptive radar cruise control, automatic high beam, lane keep assist, road sign recognition and an advanced pre-collision system with autonomous emergency braking, pedestrian and cyclist detection and intersection turn assist.
And while the level of safety tech included in a cheap car is impressive, what really sold us on the Yaris is that it is immensely frugal and also fun to drive.
Normally ‘‘immensely frugal’’ and ‘‘fun to drive’’ don’t usually feature in the same sentence, while ‘‘fun to drive’’ and ‘‘Yaris’’ haven’t even made eye contact for more than a decade now.
But in the new one they are BFFs, because this all-new from the ground up Yaris is now based on the same excellent TNGA (Toyota Next Generation Architecture) platform as the likes of the aforementioned Corolla and RAV4, as well as the Prius, and Toyota’s new-gen architecture is nicely at home under the lighter car, with the Yaris feeling wonderfully agile and responsive.
All versions of the Yaris are powered by an impressively strong 1.5-litre three-cylinder petrol engine that has a brilliantly characterful triple growl when you wind it up and produces 88kW in petrol-only guise, with the hybrid powertrain producing a combined output of 85kW.
And it is that hybrid powertrain that is the littlest Toyota’s secret weapon by being almost insanely economical.
Seriously – Toyota claims a minuscule 3.3L/100km combined fuel consumption for the Yaris hybrid and this is almost laughably easy to achieve, even when you are really not trying.
The secret to the Yaris hybrid’s tiny fuel consumption lies in the amount of electriconly running it can do – Toyota claims fuel consumption of 3.6L/100km for the extra-urban cycle (that is: open road running) and an impossibly tiny 2.8L/100km consumption for the urban cycle, thanks to all of the time it can spend on the electric motor alone – we regularly saw up to 50 per cent of around town commuting on the battery alone according to the read out in the trip computer.
And guess what – it is stupidly easy to replicate those claimed numbers in the real world. The whole time I ran about Auckland in the Yaris it never registered more than 3.8L/100km for a trip and easily sat under that 2.8 figure if I avoided motorways. That is deeply impressive.
Of course, we can’t talk about the Yaris without mentioning the fact that it is now a family of cars, even if the rest of that family didn’t quite arrive in time to make consideration for Top Cars.
I am, of course, referring to the Yaris Cross small SUV and the GR Yaris hot hatch.
The Yaris Cross uses all the same bits underneath the hatch, but wraps them up in a higherriding baby SUV body, while the GR Yaris was developed from Toyota’s rally car by Toyota Gazoo Racing for some rather spectacular results.
We have driven both cars since the Top Cars decision was made and can happily report that both would only have bolstered our decision to give the Yaris the win if they had been included, with the Yaris Cross being even more comfortable, with a bigger boot and an even better ride, while the GR Yaris is just all sorts of wonderful hot hatch madness that resets what you expect from the segment. And we already expected quite a lot.
That the Yaris hatch alone was enough to clinch our Top Car award speaks volumes about just how damn good the basic package is.