The Toyota Yaris Hybrid-R Was The GR Yaris In An Alternative Timeline

Ah, the Toyota GR Yaris, a car that we have quite literally run out of praise for. After all, what more can you say after giving it a Car of the Year award just as we did last year?

When it was first revealed in 2020, it quite frankly blew our minds. A 1.6-litre, all-wheel drive, almost 300bhp Toyota Yaris was seemingly unthinkable at that point, given your only choice was a perfectly fine but utterly mundane hybrid. Or was it?

You see, although it took WRC regulations for Toyota to build the GR Yaris, it had toyed with the idea of a 300bhp version of the hatchback before. Let’s take a moment to look back at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show.

It was there when the Toyota Yaris Hybrid-R was revealed, designed as a way of bringing together its road cars and its then still-fresh return to endurance racing with its hybrid Le Mans Prototype. The Yaris was seemingly a strange choice then, but the specs left a lot to behold.

Powering this Yaris was a 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine, exclusively driving the front wheels. That on its own could produce 296bhp, which at the time would’ve been a mind-boggling amount anyway.

Yet, it’s the ‘Hybrid-R’ bit of the Yaris that really took things up a level. On the rear axle sat two electric motors combining to push the total system output of the hatchback to 414bhp. Utterly, utterly bonkers.

The madness doesn’t even end there. Rather than drawing power from a traditional battery, the Hybrid-R used a supercapacitor – similar to the one seen in the much later Lamborghini Sian – which could store power regenerated by the motors under braking. That would then be deployed via a third electric motor positioned between the rear axle and six-speed sequential gearbox.

Naturally, it got a sportier look over the pretty bland base Yaris. Those include a more aggressive bodykit, blue accents to match the Hybrid branding and flare wheel arches housing 18-inch alloy wheels sourced from TRD. Inside, Alcantara got plastered everywhere while a set of Recaro buckets were dropped in.

So what happened to it? Well, truthfully, there was never an expectation that the Toyota Yaris Hybrid-R would go into production. Rather, it was a showcase of what the Japanese firm could do with the tech. Instead, it’d take another seven years and the formation of Gazoo Racing’s road car division for a proper Yaris hot hatch. We’ll be the first to say that wait was worth it.