Star Trek ready for adventure
TREK is a bicycle company that’s based in Winconsin, USA. I’d heard of them but our bikes are Britishmade machines. They’re hybrids which means that they’re not bad on road and capable of going off-road through woods and along muddy tracks. But then you probably know this already; you might even have what marketing people refer to as an “active lifestyle” and do loads of cycling across rugged terrain.
If you do then Toyota will be hoping that you’ll be interested in purchasing its new Corolla TREK. The car industry has a fascination with capital letters.
The proper name, for example, for Nissan’s Leaf electric car is LEAF. I tend to ignore all this and just use a single capital letter. So for the rest of the test this car will be called the CorollaTrek. After all the bicycle company, with which Toyota developed the car, spells its own name without excessive capitals. So here we go, I hope you’re feeling adventurous. The Trek is based on the Corolla Touring Sports... or estate to you and me.
I said in the previous paragraph that Toyota developed this car with the bicycle company but I suspect in reality this consisted of a couple of legal people in suits signing a licensing agreement so that Toyota could use the name. Oh, and Toyota does sponsor Trek’s European racing teams.
The car itself didn’t really need a vast amount of developing because for one thing the template for making an estate car a bit more rugged and active lifestyley is set in stone. Or mud, if you prefer.Audi did the job with itsAll Road,Volvo with the Cross Country, Skoda with its Octavia Scout and many others have done similar. It’s simple: raise the suspension to increase the ride height so that bits like exhausts aren’t torn off and add some plastic cladding around the wheelarches, some faux protective plates under the front and rear bumpers and there you go.
Which is exactly what Toyota
has done with the Corolla Trek. The suspension has been tweaked to give an extra 20mm of ride height and underbody protection has been fitted.
The Trek is two-wheel drive and is not fitted with any off-road biased traction control system as are many 2wd crossovers. Neither is it fitted with anything other than standard road tyres.
TO BE fair to Toyota, increased ground clearance is all that most customers, even the active ones, will need.
A Corolla Trek is a Trek so there is no choice of trim level, what you do get to choose is engine size.
Both the 1.8-litre and 2.0-litre petrol engines are part of a hybrid powertrain using Toyota’s wellproven and hugely reliable technology; the smaller engine produces 122bhp and the larger one 184bhp.The price jump from the 1.8 to 2.0 isn’t that large as the less powerful Trek costs £29,225 and the 2.0-litre £30,950. On a finance or PCP scheme I doubt you’d notice the difference.
We’re testing the Corolla Trek in the latter, more powerful form and in white with the exclusive to Trek black 17in alloy wheels.
The Corolla is an attractive looking motor, a million times more appealing than the tragically dull Auris that went before it.
The only thing that car had going for it was incredible reliability and that, when it comes down to it, is pretty important.
Those black wheels and the black plastic cladding do give the Corolla Touring Sports a more functional look and the 20mm increase in ride height adds something to the mix, too.
Step inside and you’ll see the brown and grey upholstery that’s also standard on the Trek. It sounds as exciting as the inside of Alan Partridge’s wardrobe but actually it’s rather tasteful.
There’s also wood trim on the dashboard around the air vents and running above the glovebox. It’s clearly fake wood and reminds me of ’70s Ford Cortinas.A pointless but inoffensive bit of additional Trekiness. The engine drives – via an electric motor – through a ContinuouslyVariable Transmission (CVT) gearbox to the front wheels.
CVT gearboxes can be rather irritating with a tendency to allow the engine’s revs to rise and fall but this car’s unit isn’t too bad. There are paddles behind the steering wheel that can be used to select false gear ratios but I didn’t bother because it’s a fairly pointless exercise.
You won’t experience long periods of electric-only motion in this car; rather it will be frequent but short burst of electrification as the car seamlessly switches between internal combustion and electric power.You can tell when you’re getting electric assistance because a green symbol illuminates in the display.
The last Corolla estate that I tested was a 1.8-litre model and I managed to get some pretty impressive fuel consumption figures from it: the WLTP fuel consumpion for the car is between 55.42mpg and 65.94mpg but I managed 67.8mpg.
What surprised me about that result is that quite a lot of driving was done on dual carriageways and motorways. Hybrids tend to lose their advantage on motorways so I was surprised the Corolla’s consumption did not fall off a cliff.And I wasn’t driving that slowly either.
Although I didn’t cover quite so many miles in this Trek it was looking likely that an average of mid-60s mpg was likely.
Practical and attractive, the new Corolla Trek is likely to be as reliable as most Toyotas. It’s economical and will be very easy to own.Whether it is any more appealing than the standard estate will be very much down to your taste.And lifestyle, of course.