Toyota’s GR Corolla is one hot ride
On paper, it is easy to understand the hype for the Toyota GR Corolla. For $39,995, car enthusiasts can pretty much get the closest thing to a WRC-winning rally car that money can buy and that your DMV will let you register for road use.
While it shares its body with a practical five-door hatchback, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division stuffed lots of high-performance toys for unlimited smiles per gallon, including a turbocharged 1.6-liter three-cylinder engine producing 300 rampageous horsepower under the hood, an all-wheel-drive system, track-ready suspension, and a stiffened chassis.
Toyota
Toyota isn’t faffing about with American demand for its pocket rocket
With all this in tow, it is easy to see how Toyota’s fast, little hatchback could be a sleeper hit that is taking the automaker by surprise. According to a new report by Reuters, insiders say that demand for the all-wheel-drive pocket rocket in the U.S. is so high that it is making a major production shift to satisfy their cravings.
According to two sources close to Toyota, the Japanese automaker is moving some GR production from Japan to the UK in order to reduce the delivery wait times for export vehicles for the North American market. Currently, the GR Corolla is built on a dedicated assembly line shared with the GR Yaris at Toyota’s Motomachi plant in Toyota City, Japan, which is reportedly insufficient to satisfy enthusiast demand in the U.S. and Canada.
To accommodate this, Toyota will spend nearly $56 million to dedicate one production line at its plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, in the UK. When it comes online in 2026, this line will be capable of producing 10,000 cars per year for export to the North American market. Opened in 1992, Burnaston uses some of Toyota’s advanced production technology to pump out cars as fast as one per 60 seconds. Already, the English factory produces the Toyota Corolla hatchback, the vehicle on which the GR Corolla is based.
James Ochoa
However, one Toyota source who spoke to Reuters said that the automaker will temporarily dispatch engineers to the English factory to share its expertise and knowledge with the workers on building such a car. The sources who spoke with Reuters emphasized that GR models like the GR Corolla and GR Yaris require more time and effort to produce than their non-GR counterparts because of the many procedures that machines cannot do.
Moving production of high-margin cars to the UK can be a tariff power move.
Although Toyota produces and sells a smaller chunk of GR Corollas compared to its more mainstream models, Toyota insiders note that their higher price tags compared to “regular” Corollas command higher margins for the company, which could be a good deal, given the tariff situation currently at hand.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration brokered a trade deal with Kier Starmer and the British government to reduce tariffs on UK vehicle imports from 27.5% to 10%. While automakers seem to get a break, the Trump administration restricts this ‘special rate’ for the first 100,000 cars automakers bring on American shores. Toyota insiders told Reuters that the move was not made because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported cars.
James Ochoa
Final thoughts
I am not surprised that Toyota would be considering this move, as there seems to be something about the UK and hatchbacks. Previously, the last generation of Honda Civic Type R was made in Swindon, England, alongside production of the “standard” Civic Hatchback destined for American shores.
Nonetheless, the GR Corolla is an exhilarating car, even when equipped with an automatic transmission. However, I do hope that when they make this shift, Toyota GR fans will be vigilant for any noticeable differences in build quality compared to units from the Motomachi plant. Those GR engineers have a lot on their plates.
