Another Household Appliance

 

My bride took this photo on her way to sewing.

I'm in the habit of posting reviews of anything different I drive, and as we've been using a hired Toyota Corolla whilst the Kia's been at the panel beaters, I've decided to continue the practice.

The car in question is the base (hire car version) of the ubiquitous Corolla, available now only as a hybrid. This hybrid-only policy of Toyota as it relates to their sedans and SUVs is an interesting trend. They call such vehicles "PHEV", but I'm not entirely sure what the "P" in the acronym stands for. "HEV" is clearly "Hybrid Electric Vehicle". Usually the "P" denotes the capacity to plug the vehicle in for recharging, but this is not the case with tis particular Corolla.

Boot's a bit small because batteries.

It's a very basic, but entirely user-friendly vehicle, which seems to embody the time worn characteristics of Toyotas as very well put together and conservatively engineered.

Having said that, I had previously hired a Corolla a few years ago on a northern trip, and although it was essentially the same car, there have been some improvements.

Firstly, the driver assisting technologies seem to have been positively fine tuned. No longer does the lane keeping feature aggressively grab at the steering if it thinks you are wandering out of your lane. In this car, it was more of a nudge than a grab.

The wiggly jiggly bits. There's two motors. Count them.

I was not able to test the adaptive cruise control (ACC) as I didn't take it out on the open road, so aren't too sure how this works on the later model. As I recall the ACC worked well in the trips we took around Cairns in the other Corolla.

The hybrid drive train is seamless and very efficient. I put 8 lit into it prior to return, after travelling 56 kms around the suburbs. Unless my maths is dodgy, that's about 4lit/100km - not shabby.

A bit sombre.

According to AI driven searches, the Australian market Corollas are manufactured in Aichi, Japan, so the quality engineering and assembly should be maintained. This particular example seemed as tight as a drum.

So the household appliance is a very sound and rational means of transport, pleasant, if not fun to drive. You do pay a premium, even for the base version, compared (say) with a Mazda three (about $3000), but you'd probably recoup most of it in retained value.

Strangely perhaps, the controls around the proximity key and the HVAC are almost identical with those in my van.