Few cars generate as much buzz as the 2023 Toyota GR Corolla has in just over two weeks. Toyota wants to keep the hype going. And nothing builds hype like scarcity.
A company spokesman has confirmed that Toyota will build just 6,600 GR Corollas for sale in the U.S. 5,100 will be the base Core model. 1,500 will be the even-higher-performance Circuit edition.
Toyota still hasn’t even hinted at pricing for the GR Corolla. But scarcity means that the sticker price will have little meaning – huge dealer markups are the rule of the land when it comes to scarce high-performance cars.
Dealers won’t have many to mark up. A dealership employee told CarScoops that each dealer expects to get “about three” GR Corollas to sell. The math works. America has around 1,500 Toyota dealerships.
About the GR Corolla
The 2023 GR Corolla, if you haven’t been on the internet this month, is a high-performance hatchback nominally built on the platform of the ever-popular Toyota Corolla. Nominally, we say, because it’s been beefed up in every way to turn an affordable compact car into a tiny rocket.
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It uses a 300-horsepower turbocharged 3-cylinder engine (you read that right – 100 horsepower per cylinder), permanent all-wheel drive, and plenty of suspension tricks from Toyota’s racing division to turn the humble Corolla into one of the hottest hot hatches the world has yet seen.
Competition Getting Hotter
It may help spark new interest in a category of car that has almost faded from the Earth in recent years. Hot hatches were once common but were nearly out of production as recently as last year. This year, we’ve seen multiple high-performance versions of cheap commuter cars (not all hatchbacks), including a new Honda Civic Si, a new VW Golf R, a new Subaru WRX, Hyundai’s Elantra N, and now the GR Corolla. We still expect a Honda Civic Type R to break cover this spring as well.
