Perusing the full-year car sales numbers of 2023 gives a good insight into automotive taste among SA motorists.
The trends are clear. Bakkies (Hilux, Ranger, D-max) dominate as workhorses and as a more affordable way into lifestyle 4x4 vehicles and family SUVs.
Hatchbacks, dominated by Volkswagen’s Polo Vivo and Polo, and the Toyota and Suzuki range of hatchbacks (Swift, Starlet) are popular as cheaper and functional transport, and a plethora of crossovers is dominated by the Durban-built Corolla Cross, but with a bewildering array of Chinese offerings representing the most absurd brand-salad hot on the Toyota’s heels.
Notable by their absence is what those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s would call “a car” — a three-box sedan. The most popular, the Corolla Quest (also built in Durban) came in at number 23 in SA’s 2023 sales charts, selling fewer than 6 000 in the year.
It is my nature to question the whims of fashion, be they sartorial, political or automotive, and focus on the fundamentals. So, it was with this in mind that I asked Toyota if I could borrow a current-generation Corolla sedan.
I’ve been reviewing cars for more than 20 years and the problem with this is that as time passes — as with changing mores in society generally — the idea of what is normal, what is acceptable and even what is “good” drifts in a manner so imperceptible that you might not notice it happening. Some time in the Corolla provided quite a rough and surprising moment of realignment.
The Corolla isn’t just good, it is absolutely superb.
Of course, as I cruise into the wrinklier end of my 40s developing a predilection for cars beloved of older folks is a risk, and actuarially-minded readers will have to adjust for that. But still, let’s look at the facts. Every one of last year’s best-sellers has a design flaw that the Corolla eliminates. Everything with a raised ride height (SUVs, Crossovers, bakkies) introduces lateral discomfort by extending the distance between the passengers and the road, meaning bumps and lateral movements are amplified for passengers. This is rather unfortunately known as lateral jerk (there’s always one, etc) and is a subject of academic study.
They also handle less well, use more fuel due to their larger frontal area and experience worse wind noise.
Any bakkie (or SUV based on a bakkie) uses a commercial vehicle platform that is as tough as nails but is also not really a car. All the benefits of that toughness also means a helping of “chassis judder”, a source of discomfort that motor engineers can get extremely nerdy about.
Any small car, such as a hatchback, has a short wheelbase with the associated impact on what I believe is called yaw and pitch rates, which is to say that the ride can get choppy and they are fidgety at speed.
Being a low-slung, unibody medium-sized car with a decent wheelbase, the Corolla just has to turn up to be streets ahead on all this stuff for on-road comfort. It shook me a little when I realised that nothing in 2023’s best-seller list comes even slightly close to the Corolla for comfort.
Having rocked my sense of what is normal, the Corolla then started to twist the knife by being equipped with a hybrid drivetrain. Toyota’s hybrid tech is approaching 30 years old now, and to say that they have refined the technology is to understate it.
Using a fiercely clever mix of a fuel-efficient 1.8l petrol engine, electric motors, a battery pack and regenerative technology, hybrid cars are significantly more fuel-efficient than their internal combustion-only stablemates. Being petrol-electric also brings other benefits in terms of how quiet they are, reduced emissions and eliminating smelly and dangerous diesel fumes.
All in, it produces 103kW, which is more than enough for a family runaround, and in my time with the car, in the worst kind of urban grind, I averaged between 5-5.5l/100km depending on the conditions.
The Corolla runs on the TNGA platform, which is tight and ensures good ride and handling. It’s a front-wheel-drive hybrid-powered family sedan, so those in the hunt for ragged-edge driving thrills ought to look elsewhere, but it is tidy, responsive and predictable. A CVT gearbox also encourages drivers to focus on comfort.
It may be only a Corolla but it’s got all the toys, including adaptable cruise control, lane-keep assistance, automatic braking, blind spot monitoring, automatic braking, a killer stereo with CarPlay and Android and airbags everywhere. It has excellent legroom and a gigantic boot.
It’s really a stupendously unpretentious thing, meaning the other feature that comes as standard fit is anonymity — and for some people that might be just what you want. I may as well have been invisible for all the attention I attracted in the Corolla. No matter how big a deal you are, you can be absolutely sure that nobody knows who you are.
Unlike the crossovers, it does not mimic an SUV or attempt to project a tough-guy image. It does not have silly wheels or sporting pretensions, fake exhausts, useless air scoops, nonsense diffusers or non-functional spoilers or other supposedly aerodynamic fripperies.
It doesn’t play vroom-vroom noise through the stereo like a BMW, and it does not pretend to be able to carry a ton of bricks or to be able to conquer the Kaokoveld. It doesn’t make you look rich or poor. It really just is; the car redux. A distillation of hundreds of millions of man-hours of engineering and fettling and refining, done at scale, over and over again.
The Corolla is objectively the best car I’ve driven in longer than I care to remember. It is on us — myself included — to wonder why we hardly ever buy them any more. Certainly, it’s not the Corolla. It’s us.
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