The 2025 Tokyo Auto Salon is in full swing and brands continue to unveil the new models that they expect to launch in the near future along with the features that will hopefully revolutionize the automotive industry in years to come. One of the brands that surprised attendants was Toyota, who introduced a GR Yaris prototype featuring a new 2.0-liter turbo-4 engine in a mid-engined layout.
This new car is the latest in Toyota’s efforts to create what they are calling the “ever-better motorsports-bred cars.” It is part of a collection of test vehicles engineers are using to improve the brand’s lineup and reach the next level in their racing experience. Having said that, it is not the first car that they have created with this aim, the new GR Yaris prototype is part of a lineup that already includes a GR Yaris that’s seen action in Nürburgring endurance races and another GR Yaris that sports a custom aerodynamic package. This last one is still being fine-tuned by Toyota engineers with input from some pro drivers but it promises to deliver a better driving experience once the final prototype is in and goes to production.
After Toyota teased both customers and journalists in 2023 with the new FT-Se concept, an electric sports car that looks tailor-made for a mid-engine layout, there have been rumors swirling around about where the brand would take the project. It seems like one of the options has been revealed along with the GR Yaris M, a mid-engine prototype that is fascinating those in the industry. Despite the teasing of the FT-Se concept model, many have been surprised by the announcement and have considered it a curveball since Toyota has not mentioned any plans to launch a mid-engine car, but fans of the MR2 have been waiting for this moment for years and seen to be thoroughly vindicated.
Despite rumors and other wishes, the GR Yaris M is still, according to Toyota, a platform experiment. The company is planning to push its limits by entering it in Japan’s Super Taikyu racing series but there are no plans of as right now to put the car into production. Premiering it on a race is a good way to see what the car can do in a real-world competition and to gauge the market to see if there would be interest in a road legal version.
The future of Toyota
This could be the reason for the brand’s hints about a new sports cars coming down the pipeline, but it would be incongruent with the mid-engine design buzz, as everything representatives of the brand have alluded to seems to indicate that they will be sticking with more traditional setups for that one. The new model would be a modern take on the Celica, which would be in line with a subtle announcement they have made in their cartoon series, Grip.
Despite being one of the perhaps less serious ways to make announcements, brands have been known to give hints about their strategies in some unexpected ways, and in one of the latest episodes of the series produced by Toyota, a whiteboard with a list of potential new models: a Supra, a Celica, an MR2, a GR86, and a GR GT3 was included, giving the most avid investigators some possible clues about the direction the brand is planning to move to.
And for the skeptics we must say that the GR GT3 has already been spotted doing laps both as a race car and a road car prototype, and there’s speculation the road version might eventually wear a Lexus badge. This could bode well for the rest of the models in the whiteboard, but only time will tell if the company chooses to stick with that direction or changes course.
