Toyota: No more cheap cars, but let us show you these used ones

Shopping for a new car on a budget?

You'll never see a cheap entry-level Toyota again, but the brand believes it has just the right thing for you.

Canny readers might observe that there haven’t been any 'cheap' Toyotas for a while now, but the brand admits it can no longer offer brand-new, coin-conscious cars.

At the launch of the new-generation, Europe-sourced Toyota C-HR – which itself sees price hikes in the region of $11,000 or 35 percent – Toyota confirmed an end to its most affordable model, the $24-32k petrol-powered Yaris. RIP.

This means the cheapest new Yaris you can buy in 2024 is the SX hybrid at $30,190 before on-road costs – and in fact it repositions the petrol Corolla sedan as the most wallet-friendly model in the brand’s line-up, from $29,270 for the Ascent Sport. Toyota has also axed the cheaper petrol Corolla hatch.

What can a budget-driven Toyota buyer do?

They could go elsewhere, although 'cheap and cheerful' is nearing extinction – but the brand's sales and marketing boss Sean Hanley says a used Toyota is just the ticket.

Mr Hanley said that while he would “never say never” to the notion that the brand may once again offer more affordable, budget-conscious cars in the future, the company is reacting to order banks and predicting where demand is heading before it makes decisions such as cutting petrol versions of different models.

“The only thing driving petrol retention at the moment would be the demand patterns of the car. If people still want to buy them, we still try to supply them,” he said.

That flies in the face of the apparent facts, with Toyota Australia confirming that in 2023, the brand sold a grand total of 1935 Yaris hatches – and of those, just 547 (or 28.2 percent) were the more expensive hybrid models.

Mr Hanley explained that existing sales are just part of the considerations when it comes to planning ahead.

“When we make our assumptions, we look at orders and sales, but given that we've been largely restricted on hybrid variants, we’ve got to look at our natural demand through order intake. That's what we look at, and that's quite a different scenario to what you might see as sales,” he said.

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“What happens though, it gets to a point in your portfolio of any product review, where once you start to get above 90 percent all hybrid, it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep bringing them (petrol variants) in,” Mr Hanley said.

“So it's just the balance – while customers want petrols in volume, we will deliver. But when that diminishes, as we're starting to see with hybrid, so that trend is obvious; we will move more and more to hybrid only.”

Mr Hanley referred back to the seismic shift in pricing for the Yaris between the current-gen model and its predecessor. In case you’ve forgotten, as recently as 2020 there was a Yaris on sale for $15,390 plus on-roads.

“We moved up with the new Yaris. At that time, a lot of people kind of didn't grasp it, but we said the sub-$25k market would need to be filled from our perspective as a brand by a new product offering called Toyota Certified Pre-Owned Used Cars,” he said.

Mr Hanley posited that anyone in the market for a more affordable car from Toyota can buy a used vehicle instead of a new one.

“We give peace of mind to those people who buy our Certified Used cars. So that's where we see those customers will have an offering for Toyota. Good quality warranted Toyota used vehicles across that smaller SUV and passenger car line-up.”

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When asked if the brand could ever again feasibly offer a new model for less than $30,000, Mr Hanley was circumspect.

“'Never ever' is permanent. And nothing is permanent in this world. so you never discount it. But right now, if you say to me, 'do you have that car coming?' The answer's no, we don't,” he said.

Buyers of budget new cars have been hit hard by recent cost increases, with the likes of the Kia Picanto seeing big price jumps for its new model range (now from $20,690 drive-away), and the soon-to-be-replaced MG3 is set to see a big jump in asking price due to a sizeable increase in safety technology and new powertrain tech. The current MG3 kicks off at $19,990 drive-away.

Is a second-hand Toyota a good alternative to a new cheap car from a different brand? Tell us in the comments what you’d do.