A very funny thing happened this week...
As of March 11th, Toyota Australia no longer sell petrol only variants of their motor cars. The announcement which was made last week was swift and in the background to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries having a whinge about not wanting Euro 6 and Japanese fuel economy standards to apply in the Australian market, Toyota made a business decision.
Up front people like Michaelia Cash and Sussan Ley have been carrying on like shrieking goats (while Peter Dutton slinks off to run a campaign bout nuclear power) and complaining voraciously about how the Albanese Government is dictating what people are going to drive, and this in turn has fed the mewling and puking cacophony of howling morons at Sky News, 2GB and 3AW. Meanwhile, Toyota made its announcement almost silently and nobody took any notice at all.
As someone whose choices of cars in the past has included the Hyundai Excel X1, Ford Ka Mk I, Peugeot 206, and currently a Mazda 2 DJ, I have crossed shopped the Toyota Yaris (also Echo) on multiple occasions. On every occasion thus far, Yaris has always lost out by virtue of being soulless and lifeless. From what I can gather, Toyota make excellent vehicles and although they can make exciting motor cars, their policy has always been to charge a premium for them and to leave cars that feel no more exciting than an appliance to drive, to whom they consider to be plebs. Pleb money is good enough to sell dross to but not good enough to sell fun to.
However, with the end of all petrol only orders for Yaris and Corolla, this leaves only their Hybrid and GR Hybrid levels of trim for these cars. Again, the hybrid Yaris by virtue of carrying 195kg in batteries, is permanently like carrying two fat men around forever. Discontinued petrol Yaris weighed 995kg, and Hybrid Yaris weighs 1190kg. Similar kinds of shenanigans occur with the Corolla and it is only with GR Corolla that Toyota bother to hand back any kind of fun at all.
As of today, the 14th of March 2024, any options to order what used to be the normal Yaris, Corolla, and even the Hilux Work Mate, have all been removed from the Toyota Australia configurator on their website. Orders officially stopped on Monday the 11th but evidently it took a bit of time for Toyota to slowly turn the lights out.
As of today, the variants from bottom to the top of the range for Yaris and Corolla are:
$36,260 - Yaris Hybrid
$52,590 - GR Yaris
and
$40,620 - Corolla Hybrid
$62,300 - GR Corolla
Granted that the GR Corolla is a turbocharged and four-wheel-drive car which exceeds the specifications of the utterly mad Group B cars of the WRC in the 1980s and the World Rally spec of the early 2000s but at more than $60,000, it is neither cheap, nor necessarily cheerful. The Yaris at more than $50,000 for its own GR variant, is also not great value for the money.
At this point I have to question whom exactly Toyota think are going to buy either Yaris or Corolla any more. Is 36 grand for a Yaris even remotely sensible? What about 40 grand for a Corolla? Even if you adjust for inflation, this means that the base model Corolla is now more expensive in real terms than what you used to be able to get a 5.4L Coyote V8 Ford Falcon for. Maybe Toyota actually are pricing these things so that they direct people into buying yawn inducing SUVs and that Yaris and Corolla are essentially penalty pricing these two cars. If we roll back the clock, Corolla at one time managed to work its way all the way up to No.3 on the sales charts behind Commodore and Falcon, but now with Ranger, Hilux, and D-Max taking those place, Corolla actually isn't the volume seller that it used to be. As for GR Yaris and GR Corolla, can they really survive as hot-hatches if the hatch which they come from, dies?
I write this as someone who likes cars and who likes driving them. However, as someone who works in an office all day long, corralling numbers into grids in tax returns and the like, I do not get to drive many of them. As far as driving the GR Yaris and GR Corolla go, I will likely never drive either. That's fine. I completely understand that by virtue of being soulless and lifeless, Toyota weren't likely to get my money anyway. However, by removing any and all variants of reasonably cheap cars, and practically making the only cars in their lineup worth driving their GR line, what Toyota have done is decided that Pleb money is no longer good enough to sell dross to any more.
This is fine. We have seen this before.
Motor manufacturers are businesses which exist for profit. Their sole point is to make money. Once upon a time, motor manufacturers were businesses which would sell motor vehicles to ordinary people. As wages since 1978 have been falling in real terms, and as the share of GDP given to wages has also been falling, and as the number of 'kids' who can actually afford to buy cars has also been falling, the whole market to sell any kind of cheap car to chase Pleb money has also fallen out. Ford decided that it could not be bothered any more and in its last dying gasps, it removed all but the ST-Line from Fiesta, Focus and Mondeo, before giving all of them the knife. Ford no longer sell cars except for Mustang. Toyota are in fact playing exactly the same game here. My suspicion is that Toyota will no longer sell either Yaris or Corolla by mid-2026 and that in their place, Yaris Cross (which already exists) and nothing will replace the two.
Yet again this is classic behaviour which can be described by the basketball heat map. Why bother trying to go for 2-points when you can shoot from further out to make 3-points, when you only need to hit 2/3rds of the shots? 3 x $20,000 = $60,000 or 2 x $30,000 = $60,000. This is the same result. Or if you shoot for a more premium market then 1 x $60,000 = $60,000. For all of the shrieking of the goats, Toyota's Head Office in Aichi made a business decision which was almost completely divorced from the flavour of the political carry on in Australia. Toyota decided to make goat curry and cook everyone.
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