Toyota GR Corolla for sale, £5k convertibles

...and the furthest you've taken a car. The latest episode of The Gassing Station podcast has arrived

By Cam Tait / Tuesday, 4 November 2025 / Loading comments

You know you’ve made it as a car journalist when you become a farm owner. Clarkson’s got one, Metcalfe’s got one and, as revealed on the latest episode of The Gassing Station podcast, our very own John Howell has one, too. Granted, he’s a long way off from opening a farm shop filled with cheekily named home-grown produce or launching his own TV show, but it does make you wonder what a PistonHeads farm YouTube channel might look like.

Anyway, enough about agriculture, because we’ve got a new pod for you to listen to. We kick things off with this Toyota GR Corolla that, at the time of writing, is up for auction and open to bids. Currently an extremely rare sight in the UK, as it was only ever sold in the US and Japan, and one that’s mighty tempting given it mixes most of the rally hardware from the GR Yaris with all the practicality of the Corolla. And from 2026, it’ll be manufactured at Toyota’s factory in Burnaston, where it makes the standard Corolla, which sent John and I down a rabbit hole of searching for cars that were built in the UK but never sold here. It’s a surprisingly short list, one that hopefully won’t feature the GR Corolla for too long.

As ever, it’s on to a buying challenge for our second topic, and this week we’re focusing on something a little more budget-friendly. PHer Alex_225 is mulling the idea of chopping their two(!) Saabs in for a four-seat convertible, with a budget of just £5,000 to play with. Ideally, it needs to have something with an interesting engine, with a V8 being Alex_225’s ultimate goal. Annoyingly, John found this Audi S4 Cabriolet, which ticks pretty much every box: four seats, V8 and mega looks. It’s a smidgen over budget at £5,495, but even I can forgive him for that. My offering, meanwhile, is this BMW 325i Convertible. It may have two fewer cylinders, but it also has 6,000 fewer miles on the clock and a set of 1M-style wheels, which look ace on just about anything. I’m also in budget, too, as it’s up £4,995. So who did it better? Either let us know down below, or drop your own suggestions in the topic here.

To round things off, we dig through the ‘your highest mileage car’ topic to see how far PHers have taken their daily drivers. Special mention to andylaight, who’s taken a Peugeot 205 from zero to 303,000 miles, and lukeharding and their two 200,000-mile plus Jaguar XJ-Ss. Makes the 145,000 miles on Fiesta ST look tiny, though John did take his E39 M5 to over 100,000 miles before selling it, which isn’t bad for a 5.0-litre V8-engined M car from the 1990s. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface of a chocka episode, so take a seat, get comfortable and enjoy an hour’s worth of utter nonsense - PH-style.

Listen here