The new Corolla comes with a lot of baggage. No, I don’t mean a boot full of Samsonite’s finest; I’m talking about emotional and historical baggage, stuffed to the gunwales with stereotypes built up over 47 years of production. It is surely a historic car that is building its way into the future.
Quick, what comes to mind when you think of a Corolla? Do the words ‘boring’, ‘reliable’ and ‘resale value’ appear instantly? Then you’ve just highlighted the magnitude of the task Toyota is facing with this eleventh generation car and trying to sell it to a market that is rapidly adjusting to the existence of cheaper Korean alternatives.
All to play for, then. For a player that makes up nearly 35% of the compact segment, thus far the Corolla has been a featureless, colourless player that has traded thus far on its reputation for incredible reliability, cheap spare parts and the ability to live long lives on many continents. That’s all well and good if you’re a Nigerian waiting to buy one in eight years, but here and now…is this a car that you would buy with your own money?
For this test I received the top-of-the-line AED74,000 2.0-litre Limited with all the bells and whistles, which wasn’t noticeably different from the mid-spec car I drove at the launch event. The Corolla is still largely nondescript but handsome enough for the kind of conservative buyer that’s always flocked to this nameplate. Definitely feels a step up from the dowdy previous model. As was that car, this Corolla is built in Taiwan and the exterior quality feels right up to the mark with laser-straight cut lines and impeccable paint work. So efficient is the Toyota Way you would never know that this car rolled out of a non-Japanese factory.
Where the Limited differs from the rest of the range is in the interior. The blade that slices through the dash is finished in faux-carbon fibre though to be honest, it is not especially convincing or even that distinguishable from lesser brethren. Once again, quality is excellent throughout with a complete absence of squeaks and rattles and external road noise is impressively well damped; this is a very, very well-built car.
