Corolla hybrid a model of consistency

The new petrol-electric Corolla is thrifty for sure. But it’s also a quiet achiever in other ways, reports David Linklater.

When I got a Toyota Corolla hybrid for a week, I did exactly what you’re supposed to do in a Toyota Corolla hybrid: I commuted around the city in an unobtrusive manner to test its fuel economy.

I drove normally in a weeklong 300km commuting regime, albeit with one eye on the battery charge and the other on the real-time economy/performance gauge that replaces the tachometer in this model: the needle dives down to blue when you’re charging the nickel metal-hydride batteries through braking or deceleration, climbs to green when you’re using the throttle in an optimum-eco manner and white if you’ve gone crazy with the go-pedal.

I aimed for green of course, but not if it meant falling behind the traffic.

The result was impressive but also thoroughly unexciting as a story to tell. About five minutes after I reset the trip computer and drove the Corolla hybrid away, the average fuel economy readout settled at 5.7 litres per 100km and stayed there for the duration. It didn’t move as much as 0.1 of a litre.

Ordinarily I’d have wondered if it was broken.

But this is a Toyota Corolla, so that would be impossible.

I have found this with many hybrids. In terms of fuel economy they do what they do, regardless of the driving conditions. I had days of wallto-wall traffic (which suits a hybrid very well, as it can crawl along on battery power) and others where I had to power down the motorway to appointments (not so good for a hybrid, as the battery gets depleted and the petrol engine works hard).

Granted, it gets harder to alter the average the more kilometres you pile on, but still: no change over an entire week. Corolla hybrid? It’s a model of consistency.

There’s no doubt that the petrol-electric Corolla is aimed at the cost-conscious. It comes only in a mid-level specification that’s roughly equivalent to the conventional Corolla GLX, albeit at a $3000 premium. Toyota reckons that if you drive just 15,000km per year you’ll save $2500 in fuel cost alone compared with the GLX over five years. Even though the hybrid asks for more expensive 95-octane fuel, whereas the GLX can run on 91.

The hybrid system produces 100kW compared with 103kW for the GLX, although the petrol-electric model weighs 90kg more overall. In terms of straightline performance, the two are close: 0-100kmh in 10.9 seconds for the hybrid, compared with 10 neat for the GLX.

Toyota New Zealand is concentrating on mainstreaming its hybrid technology and I reckon this is a promising effort, even if it’s made from very familiar ingredients.

Granted, the Corolla is not the most exciting car in the world. But in choosing the hybrid over the conventional GLX, there’s very little to lose and a lot to gain.