2017 TOYOTA COROLLA
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We buy cars with our hearts, not our heads.
If we were truly rational, we’d all buy fouryear-old Buicks, drive ‘em till they drop, then buy another.
But typically, we buy something with which we somehow connect on an emotional level.
I used to think Toyotas were the exception. Who gets emotional about a beige Corolla?
A colleague of mine - I’d give credit if I could remember who it was - disagreed, saying that Toyota owners may not care so much about precise handling or emotive styling, but that their trust in their cars’ reliability is a heartfelt thing.
Not to say that all Toyotas are boring. My son’s 2005 Corolla XRS with the 170-horsepower Yamaha-built engine is really quite entertaining.
And the 11th-generation Corolla, launched in late 2013 as a 2014 model, was an attempt to inject some driving pleasure into the solid/reliable mix that has made Corolla a worldwide bestseller for decades.
It offered a longer body with almost nine centimetres more wheelbase for improved passenger space, aided by a flat rear floor, an idea Toyota might have picked up from archrival Honda Civic, but which is a good idea nonetheless.
The North American version of the car differed significantly style-wise from the homemarket/international edition, notably in its more aggressive front end.
The 2017 Corolla starts at $16,390, to the dollar the same as the Honda Civic sedan. That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
My tester, a new-this-year XSE CVT model, had pretty much every box on the order form checked off, and listed at $25,410, not including the various taxes.
The Corolla has been further tweaked for 2017, with revised grille and LED headlights and daytime running lights. (But we will all have our full headlights on all the time, won’t we? Please?) The XSE package adds alloy wheels, satellite radio, SatNav with a seven-inch screen, power driver’s seat, fake leather upholstery and a bunch of other high-end goodies.
It was painted a lovely dark blue metallic almost black. Interestingly, you can’t even get a 2017 Corolla in beige, although Falcon Gray Metallic comes close.
More important than the options is what’s standard. Primarily, that’s Toyota’s Safety Sense system, which includes automatic high-beam dimming, dynamic radar cruise control, precollision system with pedestrian detection and lane-departure alert with steering assist.
It's called TSS-P to distinguish it from the TSS-C package that some Toyotas get, which doesn't include pedestrian detection and few of the other features.
Regardless, these are things that just a few years ago were available only on big-buck cars.
Some competitors in this class offer some of these things, but here they are, even on the base $16,000 Corolla.
Personally, I always turn lane-departure systems off. I find them massively irritating. But a lot of drivers find them useful, various studies have shown they are effective, and Corolla offers you the opportunity to use them at all price levels. So, max kudos there.
The 1.8-litre, four-cylinder engine produces 132 horsepower, which is on the low side in this class these days.
As you might expect, the XSE CVT comes with a CVT - continuously variable transmission - although a six-speed manual is offered on lesser models. The anemic four-speed automatic that once was available has been rightly canned.
Typically, CVTs exhibit "motorboating" - the engine revs to its most efficient r.p.m. level and road speed slowly catches up with it.
In my first few klicks, I noticed a slight nonlinearity in the car's acceleration, but it was pretty minor. I wasn't even aware it had a CVT until I read the spec sheet, which made it all clear.
Toyota has attempted to make its CVT react more the way a conventional automatic does, with seven distinct "ratios" that provide the stepwise engine note we've become accustomed to.
Engineers hate this because it makes the CVT less efficient, but they seem forced to give in to the marketing types who tell them that customers dislike the feel of a CVT.
The motorboating is more noticeable when accelerating vigorously at highway speeds, and the engine gets a bit loud under these circumstances. But in normal operation, it felt and sounded fine to me.
This model even offers steeringwheel paddle shifters to allow the driver more control over engine revs.
A "Sport" mode button also modifies engine and transmission response and allegedly steering feel, too, although I didn't notice much difference in the latter.
The car is fairly firmly sprung, and the ride taut, not pillowy.
It also handles well. We don't normally associate sporty handling with the Corolla, but this car gets out of its own way decently.
If the standard safety gear is well above "grade level, " so is the interior. High-quality materials abound, including rich-looking stitching on the dash that matches the piping on the "SofTex" (read: "fake leather") sports seats that provide good comfort and support.
Leather, real or fake, is always too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too slippery all the time, although I must admit it looks pretty good.
At least the "too cold" part is covered by seat heaters, with two settings - hot and really hot.
No heated steering wheel, which again some competitors in this class offer. I missed it. My hands were cold. WAH.
As mentioned, it's roomy. Sitting behind my five-foot-10 self was no problem, and the trunk is big and well-shaped.
To connect all the connectivity dots, Corolla XSE has a 12-volt power socket, a USB input and AuxIn, but no 110-volt outlet. And, of course, the aforementioned seveninch touchscreen. Now, all of these are awful to varying degrees, and this one is no exception.
Some of the most-used functions such as SatNav are hidden under the APPS icon, burying them one level further down than need be.
Once you get there, the system logic isn't too bad, and you can navigate around fairly easily.
But I still think it's weird that operating your phone's touchscreen while you're holding it upright in your field of vision is illegal, but leaning over to stare at the touchscreen in the middle of your dashboard is perfectly OK.
The biggest drawback with the Corolla's touchscreen is that it is, well, way too touchy, overly sensitive.
The only two proper knobs (audio volume level and radio station/track selection) are too close to the screen, and it's far too easy to brush the screen inadvertently and BAM, you're into a completely different function.
More separation distance, less sensitivity, probably both, are called for.
And the detents on the station/track knob are far too light. It's much too easy to skip four or five steps when all you want is one.
Toyota interior designers obviously know from those audio system controls that knobs are the only way to manage functions in a car because you can operate them without looking at them.
So why isn't the HVAC system controlled with knobs? Nope. Push buttons. Even if everybody else does it this way, it's still just plain dumb.
And potentially unsafe, partially undoing all they've done with their TSS-P system.
My semi-minor gripes notwithstanding, there are a lot of reasons why Corolla has been one of the world's bestselling cars for over half a century.
And ours are built in Canada, in one of Toyota's highest-quality plants anywhere in the world.
What's not to like about that?