How the EU is blocking Japanese sports cars

► Red tape throttles JDM supply into Europe
► Emissions and safety regs are the cause…
► Meaning they’re getting rarer, more expensive or being culled

We are living in a new halcyon era of the Japanese sports car. Toyota has the petrolhead by the scruff of the neck with its GR86 and GR Yaris in Europe, as well as the GR Corolla in North America. Honda’s new Civic Type R is the instant classic we all hoped it would be. Hell, even Nissan has resurrected the Z car.

But for the European and UK enthusiast this surge of immensely tasty metal from the other side of the world comes at a significant cost. Safety and emissions regulations, combined with some huge price rises, are restricting sales so much that they could end up being seen on the road about as often as unicorns. Few cars illustrate this point more than the heavily-updated Toyota GR Yaris that’s just gone on sale in the UK in March 2024, as well as the new FL5-generation Honda Civic Type R.

With the Yaris, some will notice the astronomical price rise between the original car and the base-spec facelift; we noted a £33,495 price tag during our 2020 Hot Hatch of the Year test for a top-end Circuit Pack model with all of the goodies needed to get the best out of the car. Now? A base model GR Yaris clocks in at £44,250 – albeit that model does come with a lot of the tech from the pre-facelift Circuit Pack (and even more power) included. The new model already feels a fundamentally better car after driving an engineering prototype, but that’s still a huge cost addition.

It’s the same with the Honda. When the previous-generation FK8 launched it cost around £31k. Now, Honda’s asking for a mighty £49,995 in 2024. And where Honda UK would shift thousands of Civic Type Rs per year just a couple of generations ago, its 2023 allocation was in the hundreds.

Why? Fleet CO2 limits. Exceeding those means utterly enormous fines, even if you miss that target by a tiny amount. At the beginning of 2021, Reuters reported that Volkswagen faced a €100m fine for missing the target fleet CO2 average by just 0.5g/km.

It’s the reason why the likes of Honda have re-worked the economics around its tearaway Civic Type R. If it’s forced