For five years, America's Toyota Yaris was secretly a Mazda
Buy a Yaris sedan in the United States between 2015 and 2020 and you drove home a lightly restyled Mazda2 from a Mazda factory in Mexico. Toyota's small car wore many faces worldwide, named after the Greek goddesses of charm and beauty.
The Yaris arrived in 1999 to replace the Starlet and Tercel. Its name comes from Charis, the singular of Charites, the graces of Greek myth. For two decades it was mainly an export label: in Japan the same hatchback was the Vitz, and some markets sold the car as the Echo until 2005. Only in 2020 did Japan adopt the Yaris name. The first hatchback was designed mainly for Europe at Toyota's studio in France, and it shared only its front doors with the sedan.
The Mazda arrangement began in 2014, when Mazda started building the Mazda2 in Salamanca, Guanajuato. In April 2015 it was announced that the plant would also make a Toyota version, sold as the Scion iA in the United States, the Yaris R in Mexico and the Yaris sedan in Canada. After the Scion brand was retired, American buyers got it as the Yaris iA from August 2016 and later as plain Yaris. A Mazda-built hatchback joined in 2019. Both disappeared in June 2020 amid new regulations and slow sales, taking the nameplate out of North America.
Meanwhile the genuine Toyota line carried on. The fourth generation was revealed simultaneously in Japan and Amsterdam on 16 October 2019, and went on sale in Japan in February 2020. It spawned the GR Yaris, a three-door rally special from Toyota Gazoo Racing built so the company could compete in the World Rally Championship, with production starting in September 2020.
The name now stretches further still, to Yaris Cross crossovers and a sedan developed by Daihatsu for Thailand in 2022. By March 2020 the Yaris had sold 8.71 million worldwide.
Source: Toyota Yaris
