The Toyota Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX offers lots of space for you and your family, has a huge boot and is extremely fuel-efficient. And the best of all? It’s not a diesel or a crossover/SUV. Ciro De Siena spent a few weeks in the company of the Japanese marque’s locally made petrol-electric sedan…
Nowadays, it seems as if everyone’s driving a compact crossover or a medium-sized SUV, but given my recent experience with the Corolla hybrid, I want to make a case for the sedan as a great family car and eminently practical “daily driver”.
Toyota South Africa Motors plans to roll out hybrid variants of most of its mainstream model ranges and, so far, it offers its petrol-electric drivetrain in the Corolla Cross compact family car, Corolla sedan (both of which are produced at TSAM’s Prospecton plant in KwaZulu-Natal), as well as the popular RAV4 medium SUV.
The Corolla 1.8 Hybrid incorporates 28 years of Toyota’s petrol-electric powertrain development.
Hybrid tech is really, really ingrained in Toyota’s brand philosophy. The first Prius hybrid was launched in 1994 and it’s obviously advanced a lot since then. The Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX’s powertrain is derived from the Prius and it’s great, because you get all the benefits of 28 years’ development in a car that costs a lot less than the high-spec model on which it’s based, with styling that’s much less of an acquired taste.
In fact, the Corolla hybrid looks quite good. The 11th-gen Corolla sedan is quite a looker in my opinion, and it comes standard with LED head- and taillamps, the former replete with daytime running lights.
Ride comfort & refinement
From the onset, the Corolla hybrid proved an extremely comfortable car. The suspension tuning is pliant; it’s soft – not sporty. If you just want a comfy car in which to get to work, the Toyota sedan fits the bill.
In terms of ride quality, the Corolla hybrid’s damping is Lexus-like and its cabin is whisper quiet.
We’re talking Lexus levels of ride quality here! It’s super impressive. Also, you may often hear motoring journalists talk about NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) suppression; luxury cars try to dial out those elements so that will you have a nice, relaxing experience and get to your destination feeling fresh.
Hybrids really have low NVH levels, and the Corolla Hybrid is no exception – especially when you’re in battery mode (when the internal combustion engine is deactivated), but even when both the petrol and electric motors are working in tandem there’s very little vibration and almost no noise from the drivetrain.
Factor in the nice high-sidewalled tyres and absorbent suspension setup, allied with the minimum of harshness, and suffice to say this Japanese compact sedan is a decidedly calming vehicle to drive.
The 11th-generation Corolla impresses with its hewn-from-solid build quality, even though SX is a mid-grade spec.
Mid-grade specification
As for the interior, it’s fairly standard Toyota fare, but the materials are of a high quality, and everything has been put together really well. The instruments are a slick combination of digital and analogue with a large multi-Information display, which offers a glut of info about your vehicle. The seats are cloth, which doesn’t look as premium as leather, but I found them super comfortable, especially over long distances.
The Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX comes equipped with automatically activated lights, keyless entry, power-adjustable and heated side mirrors, cruise- and climate control, a reverse-view camera, electric windows, a leather-trimmed 3-spoke multifunction steering wheel. The touchscreen infotainment system includes a 6-speaker audio setup, plus it supports Bluetooth, USB, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto functionality.
The Corolla’s boot is cavernous… we reckon that it could swallow 6 medium-sized cooler boxes.
Generous boot capacity
In terms of practicality, the rear seatback folds through to the boot, but annoyingly, there is only a release on the shoulder of the back seat and none in the boot itself, which would have been more convenient.
I promised you a big boot and, based on our cooler-box test, the Corolla’s boot can hold about eight reasonably sized cooler boxes… and there’s still quite a lot of height left (considering that there are tools and a spare’ underneath the floor). The rear seats fold 60/40, so you can slide a bicycle in, or a kayak, or whatever you want. I dare you to show me a similarly sized SUV that offers that much luggage space!
The combination of a 1.8-litre four-cylinder Atkinson-cycle petrol engine, electric motor and a CVT is a smooth one.
Hybrid powertrain
At the heart of the Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX is the 72 kW/142 Nm 1.8-litre, 4-cylinder Atkinson-cycle 2ZR-FXE engine (shared with the Prius), which works in conjunction with an electric motor mated with a high-voltage hybrid battery, which has particularly high energy density to facilitate more rapid self-charging.
The electric motor provides 53 kW and 163 Nm (at full capacity) to boost overall system output to 90 kW (the combined figure is not an aggregate of the 2 power sources, due to transmission reduction losses).
The hybrid powertrain directs its torque to the front wheels via a continuously variable transmission (CVT). Now, a CVT means that the car always has the right gear ratio for the engine speed and the road speed and, frankly, it’s incredible how much power and torque you get out of that little electric motor.
For those who don’t understand how the hybrid technology works, the infotainments system shows a dynamic graphic.
To help you understand what the car is doing at any point, the infotainment system can display a graphic (which gets enlarged when you tap on it) that shows you where the energy is moving around the car and which component of the hybrid powertrain is busy driving the wheels… It’s quite fun to watch, actually!
Wait, aren’t hybrids boring to drive and slow? Well, no, when you put your foot down to quickly cross an intersection the Corolla hybrid hauls, because you’ve got all that torque (from zero rpm) coming from the electric motor aided by the petrol motor’s shove. The 1.8 Hybrid SX is quite sprightly – it’s not slow at all.
Although Toyota’s claimed fuel consumption figure is optimistic, we had no difficulty achieving a return of 5.0L/100 km.
Efficiency in the low 5s
Toyota claims an average fuel consumption figure of 3.5 L/100 km for the Corolla hybrid, which, combined with its 43-litre fuel tank, should give the derivative a theoretical range of over 1200 km on a single fill-up.
After driving the test unit for about a month, no matter how I drove it or where I drove it, the indicated average was 5.2 L/100 km. I think that 3.5 L/100 km is too optimistic – if you are driving every day, you’re going to get around 5 L/100 km. Do the maths on that because it’s a number that’s easy to remember.
That means that for every litre of fuel you’re travelling about 20 km! That’s a major boon, given the price of petrol these days and it’s only going to get worse, so if you want a fuel-efficient car (the Corolla Hybrid is shod with energy-saving, low rolling resistance 195/65 R15 tyres), that’s what this car can do for you.
The Corolla hybrid might not have a fashionable configuration, but the sedan offers more than sufficient rear legroom.
One-pedal driving
As is the case in battery-electric vehicles, a hybrid utilises regenerative braking (RB). To put it as simply as possible, when the car is coasting it uses the vehicle’s forward momentum through the drivetrain to spin a generator that generates electricity, which, in turn, feeds into the high-voltage hybrid battery.
It’s like free petrol, or, more accurately, free energy. If you didn’t have a generator that kinetic energy would just have gone to waste. You can alter the intensity of the regeneration in most cars that make use of the technology, but you must sift through the infotainment system’s menus. Toyota, however, has made it easy: use the transmission lever to select B (it sits under D), which priorities brake regeneration.
The instrument cluster provides you with constant feedback on the efficiency of your driving style.
To give you an example, when you’re coasting on the highway you don’t want too much regeneration – you want the car to coast quickly so that you can better modulate the speed, but when driving in built-up areas, you want maximum regeneration to take advantage of all those times when you’re slowing down. In what that does is makes your throttle pedal both your brake and your accelerator, because as soon as you get off the throttle the car is feels like it’s actively braking… in fact, it turns on the brake lights for you.
That relaxing type of motoring is part and parcel of the hybrid driving experience, because you inevitably become very aware of your car’s indicated fuel consumption figures and endeavour to get it down as low as possible by adopting an efficiency-minded driving style. It becomes like a challenge and it’s quite fun.
Price and after-sales support
The Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX costs R439 000, which includes a 3-year/100 000 km warranty and 6-services/90 000 km service plan. The hybrid battery has a separate 8-year/195 000 km warranty.
The Corolla 1.8 Hybrid SX begs the question: What more could you want from a “daily driver”?
Verdict
Cars.co.za Consumer Experience Manager Hannes Oosthuizen and I drove the Corolla hybrid extensively and both of us came to like the Japanese compact sedan a lot. It’s a great daily driver; it’s smooth; it’s comfortable; it’s pretty fast (for what it is); very efficient and, not least, supremely practical.
R439 000 gets you one of these. Now when you consider that a top-spec Volkswagen Polo (apart from the GTI hot-hatch version) retails for R426 100, Toyota’s newcomer represents a lot of car for your money.
How much more you could want from a daily driver? There really is a lot to be said for a good sedan (bearing in mind that its boot capacity is probably larger than that of a similarly sized crossover – at least in default configuration)… and I think this is one of the better ones, especially at this keen price point.
