I own a 2020 Toyota GR Yaris RZ High Performance with a 6-speed manual transmission.
Then I bought another GR Yaris: the updated 2024 model with Toyota’s 8-speed automatic, GR-DAT — GAZOO Racing Direct Automatic Transmission.
What I wanted to know was not simply whether GR-DAT was faster than the 6MT.
Once an automatic transmission becomes this capable, is there still a reason to operate a manual transmission yourself?
That was the question I really wanted to answer.
After owning both cars and driving them on public roads, motorways, winding roads and circuits, my answer today is this:
The 6MT and GR-DAT give the driver a different set of tasks.
How did I arrive at that conclusion?
I want to trace the process from the months before delivery to what I think now.
There is one important limitation to state first.
My 2020 6MT and 2024 GR-DAT are not identical cars with only the transmission changed. The 2024 GR Yaris also received changes to the engine, body, cooling, suspension, cockpit and other areas.
So this is not a controlled experiment comparing only a manual transmission with an automatic.
It is a record of what one driver began to notice after owning and repeatedly switching between both cars.
Two Months Before Delivery: Thinking About What a Manual Is For
At the time, delivery of my 2024 GR Yaris GR-DAT — which I call Car No. 2 — was still two months away.
Yet in my head, I was already driving it.
I even caught myself thinking:
“At least until the car arrives, I should make sure nothing stupid happens to me.”
That was simply how much I was looking forward to taking delivery.
Whether I was out on the water or in the mountains, I found myself leaving a wider margin for safety. I just wanted to make it to delivery day without anything going wrong.
But while I was waiting, another question began to occupy me.
I already owned a 2020 GR Yaris 6MT — Car No. 1.
So why was I buying another GR Yaris?
The answer gradually became clearer.
In an age when something like GR-DAT exists, what does it still mean to operate a manual transmission yourself?
I wanted to find out firsthand.
Is Shifting Merely a Means, or Is It a Skill in Its Own Right?
Gear changes have a practical purpose.
You select an appropriate gear ratio and manage engine speed and drive force.
But with a manual transmission, there is more to it than that.
You depress the clutch.
You select a gear.
When necessary, you bring the engine to the appropriate speed.
Then you re-engage the clutch.
You perform that entire sequence yourself, using your hands and feet.
When it goes well, it feels good.
When you get it wrong, you know it immediately.
That is why I began to think of manual shifting as a skill in its own right.
It is a little like a skateboard trick.
A skateboard trick is not simply a means of getting from one place to another. Part of the enjoyment comes from combining the human body with a tool and improving the act itself.
If there were a competition devoted entirely to gear changes, I would probably find it fascinating.
GR-DAT, on the other hand, moves much of that task from the driver to the machine.
So does that reduce the enjoyment of driving?
Or does it allow the driver to do something else instead?
That question was already on my mind before the car arrived.
From Delivery Day to 260 km on the Motorway: Learning the Car First
Then Car No. 2 finally arrived.
After driving only a few kilometres from the dealer to my home, I already felt that it was quite different from my 2020 6MT.
Even at city speeds, a great deal of information came through from the road surface and drivetrain.
It was nothing like the calm, quiet sense of motion I get from my Nissan Note e-POWER.
At first, the sheer amount of feedback even gave me a slight headache.
But it did not feel unpleasant.
It felt dense rather than excessive.
I wanted to drive the car somewhere faster.
So the day after delivery, I took it on a roughly 260 km round trip on the motorway.
The driving position and visibility stood out immediately.
The controls fell naturally to hand, and it was easy to maintain a comfortable posture over a long drive.
At the same time, I initially found the number of ways to operate and configure the car confusing.
There are D and M positions.
In M, you can shift with either the paddles or the selector.
Even in D, the paddles allow temporary manual intervention.
There are also drive modes and GR-FOUR modes.
At first, I tried to think of all these choices as a simple multiplication problem and described them as “36 combinations”.
But that was not really the right way to understand the system.
D and M are not independent settings in the same sense as choosing between paddles and the shift lever.
What mattered was not the number of theoretical combinations.
It was this:
How does the car behave in each operating state?
I needed to learn that physically.
So I began spending some time in one configuration, getting used to the way the car behaved, and only then trying something else.
Very quickly, Car No. 2 became something of an experimental partner.
The Shock on a Winding Road: “Anyone Would Be Fast in This Car”
In early 2025, I took the 2024 GR-DAT onto one of my familiar winding roads.
The transmission was in D.
The drive mode was SPORT.
And the car shocked me.
If I put my first impression into words exactly as I felt it at the time, it was this:
“Anyone would be fast in this car.”
I no longer believe that statement is literally true.
Braking, line choice, steering angle, load transfer and throttle application all clearly affect how quickly the car can be driven.
But on that first winding-road drive, I genuinely felt that way.
Even when my inputs were less than perfect, the car did not easily lose composure.
By the time I was thinking about the next operation, the gear change had already happened.
On roads where the 2020 6MT required me to process several tasks in sequence, the 2024 GR-DAT seemed simply to flow through them.
At the time, I described the sensation like this:
It was as if the horse were choosing the best way through on its own, while I was simply hanging on.
It was fast.
But it also felt slightly lonely.
For a moment, it seemed as though my own role in making the car move had become smaller.
That led me to a new question:
Was GR-DAT taking too much work away from the driver?
With GR-DAT, Shifting Recedes into the Background
As I drove the car more, I began to realise that the main characteristic of GR-DAT was not simply that an automatic transmission made driving easier.
What mattered more to me was this:
The act of shifting itself rarely moves to the foreground of the driving experience.
In a 6MT, every gear change requires the driver to intervene.
You depress the clutch, select the gear, match engine speed when necessary and re-engage the clutch.
Especially while cornering, when I do not want to introduce unnecessary disturbance into the car, that operation itself demands some attention.
With GR-DAT, I can remain in D, allow a gear change to occur and feel very little change in the car’s attitude.
The shift seems to dissolve into the flow of the car.
In M, I can shift with either the paddles or the selector.
Even in D, I can temporarily intervene with the paddles when I want to, after which the transmission returns to normal D operation under its programmed conditions.
So most of the time, I can leave the shifting to the car and intervene only when I choose to.
With the 6MT, I am fundamentally responsible for the entire shifting process from beginning to end.
With GR-DAT, much of that task can be handed over to the machine.
Over time, that difference began to matter more and more.
The Circuit Changed My Mind About the Driver “Losing Work”
After that first winding-road experience, I felt that the car was so capable that my own driving skill might have less influence on the result.
Circuit driving changed my view.
GR-DAT does an excellent job of handling the transmission.
But there is still a great deal it does not decide for me.
Where do I begin braking?
How much brake pressure do I use?
What speed do I carry into the corner?
Where do I begin steering?
How much steering angle do I build?
When do I begin unwinding it?
Where do I transition back to the throttle?
How do I connect the available grip from braking to cornering and then to acceleration?
Those are still the driver’s tasks.
And once the car takes care of the shifting, I have more attention available for them.
That is where my original understanding from the winding road began to fall apart.
GR-DAT does not eliminate the driver’s work. By moving the task of shifting to the machine, it changes the set of tasks the driver is left to handle.
On a circuit, that difference became much easier to see.
What the Circuit Revealed Was More Important Than the Lap-Time Difference
I operate both cars by myself, so I cannot compare them under perfectly identical conditions.
They are driven on different days.
Ambient temperature, track conditions, tyre condition and my own level of familiarity all change.
And again, the 2020 6MT and 2024 GR-DAT differ in more than their transmissions.
So any lap-time difference between them cannot simply be treated as a measurement of “manual versus automatic”.
Even so, driving both cars on a circuit revealed a clear difference in where my attention was going.
In the 2020 6MT, I am managing braking, line, steering angle, load transfer and throttle while also operating the clutch, selecting gears and matching engine speed.
In the 2024 GR-DAT, the attention that would have gone into shifting can be redirected elsewhere.
Lap times remain as results.
But the most important thing I learned on the circuit was not the number on the stopwatch.
The 6MT and GR-DAT Are Enjoyable for Slightly Different Reasons
After repeatedly moving between the two cars, I stopped finding much value in asking which one was simply “more fun”.
In the 6MT, shifting itself is part of the driving.
I press the clutch.
I choose the gear.
I bring the engine to the required speed.
I reconnect the clutch.
Sometimes I do it well.
Sometimes I do not.
The operation itself leaves room for improvement, and I can feel my own progress.
GR-DAT allows much of that task to move to the car.
Then other things come further to the foreground:
how I release the brake,
how I build steering angle,
where the load is,
how I am using the available grip,
and where I begin accelerating.
The two cars make me notice different things.
Even on the same road, I am paying attention to slightly different parts of the drive.
That is why owning GR-DAT changed the way I think about the difference between a manual and an automatic.
It no longer feels like a difference in transmission type alone.
Conclusion: GR-DAT Did Not Erase the Meaning of the Manual — It Made It Easier to See
Before buying the GR-DAT, I wondered whether an automatic this capable would remove the reason to choose a manual transmission.
And on my first winding-road drive, I really did feel as though:
“The horse is doing the running, and I am just hanging on.”
But after driving the car on circuits, my thinking changed.
GR-DAT takes over the task of shifting and performs it at a very high level.
In the 6MT, I handle that task myself.
That means one is not simply a substitute for the other.
It is not the same game played with a different controller.
They are slightly different games.
Learning what GR-DAT can do did not make the manual transmission less valuable to me.
Instead, it made me understand more clearly what I had been enjoying in the manual all along.
At the same time, GR-DAT brought other parts of driving into clearer view by moving shifting away from the foreground.
The most important thing I gained from owning both cars was not an answer to the question of which transmission is better.
When the car takes over a different set of tasks, the driver starts to see a different part of driving.
A highly capable automatic transmission did not make the manual transmission meaningless.
If anything, it made the meaning of the manual easier to see.
That is the answer I have arrived at after owning both the 6MT and GR-DAT.
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