Road Test
Toyota Yaris 1.3 VVT-i T3
Test date Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Price as tested £11,070
For Interior room, safety, brakes, refinement
AgainstEngine lacks poke, clumsy automatic gearbox
Toyota knows exactly how to make a small car feel like a bigger one. And contrary to what the advertising campaign for the latest Yaris would have you believe, it doesn’t involve a revolutionary new concept called ‘Bigsmall’ (which, let’s face it, sounds a little like a down-market shopping arcade). No, it works like this: you take a small car, in this case the Yaris, and make it bigger.
The new Yaris is 110mm longer than the old one. That may not sound like much, but if you were a packaging engineer you would feel like all your Christmases have come at once.
But then, with the Aygo taking over as the smallest Toyota, up-sizing was a natural move for the strong-selling Yaris. Hence the injection of what Toyota calls ‘big-car thinking’. This runs parallel to a healthy dose of if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it thinking, which means that the larger dimensions (and the attendant packaging benefits) are the only fundamental change over the old Yaris.
All the founding design tenets remain the same – the high roof (now 30mm higher), the simple-but-funky cabin architecture and the mid-dash digital instrument display – while the design, dynamics, refinement and material quality have all been developed with that ‘big-car thinking’ in mind.
Toyota’s kid glove approach is understandable. The Yaris has actually increased in popularity since its launch in 1999. Sales have risen every year to the point where, as it hands over to its successor, it accounts for one in every four Toyotas sold in Europe.
The second-generation line-up kicks off with the £8995 1.0-litre T2 petrol, but the anticipated best-seller is the mid-spec T3 with a 1.3-litre petrol engine and five doors. It costs £10,795 and we test it here. A 1.4-litre diesel is also available.
Stiffest competition comes from the excellent new Renault Clio, recently crowned Car of the Year for 2006, the much improved and strikingly pretty new Fiat Punto and the recently facelifted Ford Fiesta.
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