Toyota Yaris iA offers some fun and dependability for a low entry fee
2018 Toyota Yaris iA: A little bit of everything.
Price: $17,915 as tested. No options on test vehicle. But what you get for the money is an awful lot — stability control, brake assist, traction control, rear camera, cruise, power windows and locks, Bluetooth and Pandora. Learn to use a clutch and save $1,100.
Marketer’s pitch: “Style, tech and a whole lot more. Standard.”
Conventional wisdom: Motor Trend likes the lone trim level, two years of free maintenance, and that it’s “relatively fun to drive,” but not that it “struggles to maintain speed on inclines, cramped rear seats, minimal effort to disguise Mazda roots.”
Reality: And the package kind of works.
Odd pedigree: The Yaris iA could give Ancestry.com a run for its money if someone were to test the lineage of this Toyota.
I first experienced the tiny sedan as the Scion iA, not long before the entire division was mothballed by Toyota. But it was around far earlier than that as the Mazda2 hatchback, which is the true origin of this Toyota stepchild: A miniature Mazda from Mexico. You may see that as an embarrassing cur.
On the road: As a Mazdota, the Yaris iA outhandles most of its Toyota siblings on curves, for a tall (58.5-inch), narrow (66.7-inch), light (2,416-pound) car. There’s
some body roll and I loosened one of the wheels from the road once, but all in all some fun can be had.
Driver’s Seat: The seats are small and feel like cheap cloth, but they’re not too bad for the price. They offer some support (although the headrest leans back a bit far) and didn’tseem terribly narrow.
A little bouncy: Drivers will eventually come to appreciate that far-away headrest, though, after trying to lean into it on a Pennsylvania highway. After feeling fillings shake and wondering about signs of a concussion, I pulled my head forward ever so slightly. The Yaris iA is a light car and jostles its occupants.
Up to speed: It’s also a car with a tiny 1.5-liter fourcylinder engine, and it feels like that, too. Drivers won’t be thrown against that headrest during hard acceleration, as it takes the 106 horses 10.2 seconds to get the Yaris iA to 60 mph, according to Car and Driver (a stick shift blissfully whacks a second and a half off that time).
Sport Drive Mode: Surprise, here’s something I didn’t expect to see in the Yaris iA. The little button does caffeinate the car a bit, but I wasn’t a real fan of Sport modethis time around.
Unfortunately, the puttputt sound emanating from the engine at idle is embarrassingly unsportmodelike.
Shifty: This may only be a Mr. Driver’s Seat-world problem, but I’m forever reminding myself which way to move the shifter when using the ShiftTronic levers (BMW and Mazda pull to upshift; just about everyone else pushes). Naturally, a Mazdotagoes the Mazda way, so I made the Yaris iA engine screama couple times.
Play some tunes: Here’s an unusual selling point — you’ll get better sound from the stereo in a $16,000 Yaris iA than you will from a Lexus costing five times that. That’s because Mazda engineers apparently have actual ears, and I say this as the angry owner of a Toyota Sienna with The Worst Stereo Sound in the Universe.
Friends and stuff: SixfootSturgis Kid 4.0 is pretty much beyond the parameters of the back seat. The 5-foot-10-inch old man fit in just fine, but the padding itself made me a little weepy.
There’s only a trunk with 13.5 cubic feet of space, which makes the Yaris iA less than practical.
Fuel economy: There may be down sides to the Yaris iA, but you’ll feel better about all the gasoline you don’t buy. I averaged almost 37 mpg in the usual Mr. Driver’s Seat round of highway and country road testing.
Where it’s built: Salamanca, Mexico
How it’s built: It gets a top reliability rating from Consumer Reports.
In the end: The Yaris iA offers a lot of fun and dependability for a low entry fee.