Toyota C-HR Four go on an adventure to Cornwall
One hardy hybrid, three action-packed days, but how many happy campers?
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT To discover whether this sharply styled crossover is Toyota’s most appealing petrol-electric hybrid yet
Watch a selection of TV ads for crossovers and SUVS and you’ll be left in no doubt that the protagonists live their lives at the limit, turning each and every car journey into a thrilling, emotionally charged adventure.
In the minds of the marketeers, it seems, your average family car owner spends any spare waking moment engaging in all-action pursuits, when in reality, of course, most owners’ lives revolve around negotiating the vast steppes of the supermarket car park rather than the Serengeti.
Occasionally, though, the opportunity arises to really put a car to the test by using it in the manner the ads insist is possible, which is why I recently ended up taking our C-HR down to Cornwall for an extended weekend of climbing, camping, swimming and surfing.
Four of us bundled into the hybrid Toyota, each with our own pile of luggage, including climbing ropes, wetsuits, tents and more. We stopped short of trying to bring our own surf boards, which was just as well because when we optioned our C-HR back in May, we didn’t tick the box for the roof rack, which is a £229 option.
At the start of our trip, as we tried to figure out how to best insert our luggage into the C-HR’S 377-litre boot, I came to appreciate the value of all of those childhood days spent playing Tetris. If only those teachers who told me I was wasting my life could have seen me as I deftly exploited every last spare nook and cranny.
It was a tight squeeze, however, and relied on the four of us being happy-go-lucky chaps who pack weekend wardrobes comprising little more than board shorts and a couple of T-shirts. Practically speaking, if some members of your travelling party require more luggage – perhaps if you have a buggy-bound small child or two, for example – even world-class packing skills might not save you from feeling constricted by the load space on offer in the C-HR.
As it was, it was adequate for our purposes, even if the law of sod dictated that we needed the item squashed at the bottom of the boot more urgently than the gubbins on the top, so we found ourselves unloading and reloading the boot a couple of times each day.
Next came the challenge of packing ourselves into what from the outside looks like a fairly compact car. Once we’d argued over who had called ‘shotgun’ for the seat alongside me, we set off on our trek via Cheddar in Somerset, where we planned to take a break from the driving and have a climbing session up the gorge’s walls.
Of course, we weren’t the only people to have the idea of heading to the west country on such a weekend of fine weather. We found ourselves battling with caravans blocking narrow country roads and ended up having to divert down a singletrack road, which progressively got narrower and rougher until we ended up effectively green-laning. The C-HR’S mildly elevated ground clearance was sufficient to ensure it could negotiate some hefty potholes and make it through unscathed.
Barring a lack of leg room in the rear (I now know which of my mates has the most bony knees, thanks to occasionally feeling a set of them pressed into the back of my seat from time to time), the C-HR proved a dependable and pretty pleasant companion as we camped overnight near Newquay, visited Lizard Point, stopped off in Torquay for some coasteering and cliff diving and then finally camped on Dartmoor on our way back to the south-east.
So we’ve proven the C-HR’S credentials as a steed suitable for allaction adventurers; if Toyota needs an actor for its next big-bucks ad campaign, my agent can be contacted at the email address below… LUC LACEY