The Toyota GR Corolla appears to be a hit. In its first full year of US sales, Toyota moved 5,567 units of the all-wheel drive hot hatch. Of course, that’s just a fraction of the Corolla’s 232,370 sales last year, but the GR Corolla handily outsold its nearest rival, the Volkswagen Golf R by over 2,000 units. It also outsold every other manual Toyota on sale right now.
Toyota provided a breakdown of GR Corolla sales in calendar-year 2023 by trim.
| Model | Sales |
| Core | 3,123 |
| Premium | 677 |
| Circuit | 1,583 |
| Morizo | 184 |
Note that the Premium is a new variant for the 2024 model year, and that the Morizo was a limited-edition for the 2023 model year. Toyota initially said it planned to build 6,500 US-market GR Corollas for the 2023 model year, but it seems to have fallen a bit short, with the automaker confirming it’s sold 5,739 for both model-year 2023 and 2024. Perhaps a result of lingering supply-chain issues, rather than low demand.
Per figures Toyota provided to Motor1, GR Corolla was the most popular manual Toyota model in the US, just pipping the GR86’s 5,317 manual sales. Additionally, Toyota sold 3,287 manual Tacomas and 1,140 manual Supras.
What’s interesting is how popular the Premium is proving to be in just a few months on sale. For its $41,415, the Premium gets all the packages that were optional on the base Core model, plus suede interior trim. The Circuit also did well, considering it was only supposed to be a run of 1,500 cars for the entire 2023 model year, but was then extended into 2024.
While on paper the Golf R, being an all-wheel drive hatchback with around 300 hp, is the closest rival for the GR Corolla, the Toyota is frequently compared to the Honda Civic Type R. We’ve reached out to Honda for Civic Type R sales figures and will update this post when and if we get them.
Again, 5,567 cars isn’t a huge figure by Toyota standards, but hopefully it’s enough to justify keeping the GR Corolla around for the foreseeable future. It’s one of the coolest hot hatchbacks out there.