Toyota Yaris Cross Urban 2025 Review

The 2025 Toyota Yaris Cross Urban is the most expensive member of the cheapest and smallest SUV family offered by Australia’s top-selling automotive brand.

In all-wheel-drive form as tested here, the Urban will set you back $39,880 before on-road costs.

All up, there are four front-wheel drives and three AWDs in the seven-model range, with the FWD GX kicking things off at $30,900 plus on-road costs.

Optional paint colours (only one of seven choices is standard) add $575, while two-tone paint available only with the Urban and (FWD-only) GR Sport is $1350.

In terms of equipment, let’s start with the mechanicals. Every Yaris Cross is a petrol-electric hybrid – an offer unique in the segment.

They all come with a 1.5-litre triple-cylinder engine and two e-motors – one to boost power and torque and the other to recharge the small battery pack.

For a $3000 surcharge, all-wheel drives – such as our test car – add a third e-motor on the rear axle to provide an electric boost.

The Yaris Cross family has a pretty distinctive exterior look. Compact at just 4.18m long, it’s still longer than the original RAV4 and 230mm longer than the Yaris hatch it shares its name with and comprehensively outsells.

It has a high snout and wheel arch cladding to tell you it’s an SUV. The Urban gets its own 18-inch alloy wheel design and a power tailgate with a kick sensor.

The Urban also keeps some features to itself inside. It’s the only Yaris Cross with a head up display in front of the driver, a powered driver’s seat (dressed in fabric and synthetic leather), heated front seats and an extra USB port.

With other models it shares single-zone climate control, although it is the only AWD model to include a Panasonic-developed air purification system.

It also shares an eight-inch infotainment touch-screen, seven-inch digital instrument display, satellite-navigation, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, AM/FM and digital radio bands and a six-speaker audio system. The Urban also comes with Toyota’s connected car service, which is complementary for one year.

Standard Yaris Cross safety equipment includes an autonomous emergency braking system updated in 2024 with improved pedestrian and daytime cyclist detection and intersection collision avoidance.

The Urban will try and keep you in your lane (unobtrusively for the most part, but also easily switchable), reads speed signs, adapts cruise control speed to match the traffic ahead, monitors blind spots and rear cross traffic and will activate the LED headlights’ high beam automatically.

There are eight airbags, a small and basic 360-degree camera, front and rear parking sensors, three child seat top tethers and two ISOFIX mounts. The Yaris Cross has a five-star ANCAP rating based on 2021 protocols.

The Yaris Cross comes protected by a five-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty and a capped-price service plan that is a very competitive $1275 over the first five visits to the dealer (then it goes up appreciably). Service intervals are 12 months/15,000km.

Logical opposition for the Yaris Cross includes the new Chery Tiggo Pro 4, the Hyundai Venue, Kia Stonic and top-selling Mazda CX-3. None of them offer all-wheel drive or hybrid powertrains.

Nor do any of them have a model as expensive as our test car and some are a hell of a lot cheaper – the Chery tops out at just $26,990 drive away!

The 2025 Toyota Yaris Cross has a real weapon under its bonnet (and boot, in the case of the Urban AWD).

The Toyota hybrid system has been around for more than 20 years through various iterations and it undoubtedly works.

The fuel consumption claim of the Urban AWD is 4.0L/100km and our result on test was 5.5L/100km on 91 RON fuel. And we weren’t sparing the little engine and its attendant e-motors.

The last time carsales tested a CX-3, which is powered by an orthodox 2.0-litre engine, it came in at 7.2L/100km. So there’s a fuel saving to be made.

Despite its modest power and torque numbers, the Yaris Cross Urban is pretty peppy. That’s because the e-motor helps fill in the torque hole such a small naturally aspirated engine would naturally have at low revs.

Instead, acceleration is sharp, smooth and initially silent.

But then the engine kicks in and it does it with that typically gravelly triple-cylinder soundtrack. That’s down to the 120-degree three-cylinder firing order. It’s a distinct and – I think – enjoyable sound.

Despite how hard we pushed it – and there’s not a lot of power and torque here so you have to – the tiny (sub 1kWh) lithium-ion high-voltage battery never depleted. So we were never left with only an under-nourished petrol engine for motivation.

Another Yaris Cross asset is its fundamental handling package. Riding on Toyota’s TNGA platform, it has light and direct steering and confident handling, sitting flat on the road in corners and proving manoeuvrable and responsive.

It’s not just a compact package suitable for the challenges of the urban crawl, it’s actually an enjoyable drive.

Despite the Urban’s small overall size, it’s feasible for taller passengers to fit in the rear seat if front seat passengers are willing to co-operate when it comes to knee-room. Headroom for most people should be no problem.

Big windows ensure the view out is good for driver and passengers. The driver can even see a good expanse of the squared bonnet. A rarity.

The driver also benefits from hard-wired buttons for the air-conditioning and key audio controls. Good move.

While the 2025 Toyota Yaris Cross Urban AWD has a bunch of good points, there are some obvious negatives that work against it too.

For all its goodness, the powertrain is small and can get rowdy when worked hard – which is often. This is exacerbated by the Continuously Variable Transmission that locks the engine into optimum revs for any given situation. There’s no way of manually adjusting the CVT to ease the monotone.

You’re also going to hear plenty of tyre noise rumbling into the cabin. There is not a lot of evidence of noise dampening here.

Theoretically, the Yaris Cross does have the ability to run on silent electric power alone. But it does so only very briefly at low speed at its own volition. You can press an EV Mode button, but it rarely engages.

There are also multiple drive modes and a trail mode for off-roading (don’t!), but they have little impact.

The less impressive side of the Urban’s neat handling is the uncouth ride quality of the rear suspension, even though as an AWD it gets the more sophisticated double wishbone independent set-up rather than the FWD’s torsion beam.

It really crashes quite jarringly through the rough stuff, especially over anything with a sharp edge. And that’s exacerbated if you start adding people and luggage on top of the 1305kg kerb weight.

Move inside and there’s a hardness and cheapness to many of the trims and materials. This doesn’t befit a $45,000 (on the road) car. I always hate it when I bruise my right elbow on the door armrest!

The Yaris Cross offers the driver a sizable seat, albeit lacking in much cornering support, and a fully adjustable steering wheel. But I found the lowest seat height and highest steering wheel position didn’t quite match up for me. It will be different for others, of course. Up-front storage is adequate – although the Urban must have the tiniest lidded bin between the seats in the automotive industry.

The driver must deal with some reflections from the head-up display surround in the windscreen and a touch-screen without a home page. Instead, there are just a few small line items down the right-hand side of the screen that are hard to tap when moving along. It’s a waste of space not utilising that screen properly.

Access to the rear seat is via doors that don’t open wide enough, which makes it harder to load young kids and so on. It’s also underdone in terms of creature comforts back here. No adjustable air-con vents, no USB connectors and only one map pocket. You do get two door bins and a fold-down armrest that doubles as a ski-port.

Move to the boot and while its 314-litre claimed size is okay in the segment, it’s worth noting the cheaper FWD gets a larger 390-litre boot and a space saver spare tyre. The AWDs get an inflator kit, which is basically worthless.

Every new car sold in Australia should come with some form of spare tyre. It’s that simple.

The 2025 Toyota Yaris Urban AWD is just too expensive for what you get.

The best bits of the Yaris Cross are its hybrid system and quality driving characteristics and they are available at cheaper prices further down the model walk.

So spend less and get the same benefits.

Or spend even less for one of the Yaris Cross’s rivals; miss out on the benefits but save more up front.

Or, if you really like the idea of a tiny luxury SUV, then why not consider a Lexus LBX? It’s an upgraded Yaris Cross that’s even more expensive – and a nicer vehicle as well.

2024 Toyota Yaris Cross Urban at a glance:
Price: $39,880 (plus on-road costs)
Available: Now
Powertrain: 1.5-litre triple-cylinder petrol-electric
Output: 67kW/120Nm (electric motor front: 59kW/141Nm / electric motor rear: 3.9kW/141Nm)
Combined output: 85kW (torque not stated)
Transmission: CVT automatic
Fuel: 4.0L/100km (ADR Combined)
CO2: 90g/km (ADR Combined)
Safety rating: Five-star (ANCAP 2021)

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