Toyota Dealers Want The Yaris Back

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Toyota Dealers Want The Yaris Back

Image: Toyota

Toyota still makes a lot of models that are

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. Out of all the vehicles in its lineup, eight of them have starting prices (excluding destination charges) under $30,000. Much like

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, Toyota doesn’t have any truly small cars to sell anymore, but that may change in the near future if Toyota’s dealers get their way.

Russ Humberston Jr., the new chair of Toyota’s dealer council, recently sat down for an interview with

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in which he discussed problems like the struggle Toyota dealers will face in the coming years as more

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come into effect in some states. Auto News asked Humberston what he thinks will happen with automotive affordability this year as interest rates and average vehicle prices keep rising, and Humberston said he has a concern about Toyota’s ability to meet the affordability challenge. That’s when Auto News asked him if he’d bring the Yaris back. Said Humberston:

That’s interesting. I would definitely consider it. The challenge with that vehicle was making it compliant for safety and emissions in the United States that it made it so expensive it was bumping up against Corolla, and it’s obviously not even close to a Corolla. Toyota’s answer was that it would just make more Corollas, but that changed as well. We aren’t seeing more Corollas, so maybe something like Yaris could work again. I know a lot of dealers would like to see a subcompact hatchback again to address affordability as well as to have a product in a segment that we know has demand.

Toyota

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after the 2020 model year. The company’s reasoning?

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. It was one of the cheapest cars on the market at the time, with a starting price of just over $15,000, but Toyota sold just under 27,000 Yaris’ in 2018, and by 2019 sales had fallen by another 5,000 units. Toyota abandoned the segment, effectively pushing the brand’s price of entry to nearly $20,000, which was the starting price of the Corolla at the time. Since then,

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in other markets and its lineup expanded to include variants like the

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small crossover and the

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hot hatch. Meanwhile, Toyota offers nothing smaller than the Corolla here in the U.S.

While Humberston’s comments about a possible return of the Yaris might give hope to some who want something from Toyota that’s cheaper than a Corolla, I wouldn’t get too excited. The return of the Yaris would be complicated. Those homologation concerns are legit; if the Yaris did come back, at least in its current form, it likely wouldn’t be as cheap as it was before, probably costing basically as much as a Corolla. The current generation

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in the U.K., for instance. If the Yaris does come back, hopefully Toyota gets it right.

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#Toyota #Dealers #Yaris

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