Toyota Yaris Cross Review No Matter What You Think You re Wrong Carfection 4K

Here we are then. A Toyota Yaris Cross. A small crossover from a company that bolts everything together so well it makes a lot of others look a bit naff by comparison. But is it any good? There's a chance your eyes are rolling right now. Why would anyone other than your nan want to know about this thing? Well, it's a fascinating thing to look at from a how-on-earth-did-they-do-that perspective for one. And for two, it's the kind of car real humans buy. This is a Yaris Cross Premier Edition or Premier Edition? No one's ever said it to me so I don't really know. Either way, it means you get all the toys. Leather seats, 18-inch wheels, a heads-up display, JBL sound. Everything, essentially. Now, at a little over £28,000, it's not necessarily cheap, but everything you get is definitely cheerful. I can really hear the eyes rolling now, and they'll probably do a full lap of your face when we talk performance. It's got a 1.5-litre hybrid system with a dizzying 114bhp and 88.5lb-ft. The lecky motor makes up for most of the hybrid's combined power output, too. 0-62mph takes 11.2 seconds, and it'll top out at 106mph. At GR, this ain't, but this thing has a party piece. Toyota knows the Yaris Cross probably isn't going to be driven that much outside of town, and that makes its up to 57.6mpg figure seem a little low, if I'm honest. Now, that is based on WLTP numbers. That means it's undergone a variety of test conditions. Highway driving, city driving, fast driving, slow driving, all the kinds of driving. So, not really representative of where this will probably be used the most. But, sensible car bible Whatcar managed to get one of these to do more than 100mpg in town. Now, that is in no small part down to its non-plug-in hybrid system. You see, not every hybrid setup is created equal, and Toyota's is deliciously complicated. How does it all work, then? Well, under the hood is a petrol motor, a power control unit, a motor and a generator. You put petrol in, the petrol engine does its thing and petrels around. As well as driving wheels, it also feeds power to the generator, which in turn fires power to either the electric motor or the battery, depending on what's needed. The power control unit then decides which power from where is sent to the wheels. When the internal combustion engine isn't needed, it simply shuts down until it is. When you brake or coast, energy is sent back to the battery to keep you running dinosaur free for as long as possible. There's even more smart engineering stuff in there, but I won't lie, it makes my head feel all funny and I can't keep up. There's a reason I'm a writer, not an engineer. While you don't directly put electricity into the system from the outside, I shan't call it self-charging as that'll set the internet off, but it does use power generated by the system to feed electricity into the battery and then, you know, create something that essentially is designed to sip petrol in a massively over-engineered way and be enormously efficient in the process. It also comes with a big boot, seats that do clever folding things and a fairly smart look, but, and there's always a but, other than the less than brisk pace, it has another downside, a CVT gearbox. Ah yes, a CVT, the bane and curse of people who like driving, so this probably isn't going to set what's left of my hair alight, but how are we rolling? As a city car, this is bang on. It's quiet, it's smooth and off the lights, because it's got its little electric power plant, it's actually quite quick. You can even beat little mopeds off the lights in London, which is a rare occurrence, because they appear to be faster than a Veyron off the mark, especially when the lights turn green and everyone else isn't paying attention. The steering is light, the brakes are keen, they're not overly grabby, they're not the strongest in the world, but it's not designed to go barrelling into a corner at every available opportunity. The gearbox, yeah, it's a CVT, I have no control over it, so it sort of does whatever it wants. The aim of the game here is to be as efficient as possible, so if I fiddle with some buttons, even driving like a fool, I've managed to get somewhere in the 50s on the MPGs, which isn't too bad. I drove a load of motorway to get here, I've been driving slowly-ish up and down these roads in accordance with the speed limit. Sometimes the car is all electric, right now the battery is being fed energy, it's not feeding the wheels, which is pretty cool, I'm just sort of coasting down a hill. It's the efficiency thing that really gets me, because it's so quiet. The visibility is pretty good, I can see everything, it's almost left-sided, there are some lumpy bumpy bits, so I do get a little bit nervous when the road gets narrow in the city, but out the back, the rear window, it's respectable enough. There is a reversing camera though, so you can back into any space you want to. It's not the most clear, it's not the most high-def, but it more than adequately does the job. Inside, there's lots of plasticky bits, there's some soft touchy bits, there's some piano black. We don't like piano black, there needs to be some sort of international campaign to ban it, because while it looks shiny for five minutes, it looks terrible for the rest of time. The infotainment system is pretty good, not gonna lie. That said, I do what everyone else does, plug in CarPlay, but the nav works, it sounds good, the JBL sound system is pretty ace. The little Yaris Cross does come with drive mode, so right now I'm in the normal one, so it sort of acts as as it wants to, really. Then I can press it, and I get power mode, which gives it a little more vim, but seems just to create more noise. The car doesn't really noticeably transform into some hot hatch wannabe. There's a red thing that goes on the dash display, and that's it. Then there's also eco mode, which, well, you know what that's there for. That's there to be eco, which it seems to be doing with aplomb. That's how I was driving it most of this morning to get here. There's also an EV mode, so I can force it only to use the battery, which I quite like. If you really can't be bothered to do much else, if you don't want the engine to interrupt, say you're driving a short journey, you don't really need to use any petrol, you can just let the EV mode do its thing. There's plenty of space up front, there's loads of cubby holes to put stuff and things, the boot's plenty big enough. This is a practical, sensible car for practical, sensible people. This is not my kind of car, because I am not thrilled. I'm driving it around some beautiful twisty roads, it's gorgeous, there's not much power, it's not exciting me. It's a car, that's what it is. It's a good car, but it's a car. It's not groundbreaking, it's a small SUV that people buy because they want to be a bit higher up and they want chunky SUV looks and they want to be on lifestyle and dynamic. But that's not what this is about. This, like the best car in the world, the Dacia Duster, is a car for people who need a car to do things, rather than to be a thing. It's been painstakingly designed by one of the world's best known car manufacturers to perform as many tasks as it can flawlessly, and one of those tasks was not be a hot hatch. This is going up against cars like the Ford Puma, the VW T-Roc, small SUV fodder. Its underpinnings are from a Yaris, a regular Yaris, not a GR1, sadly, though that would be awesome. But it's a good little car. The thing is, people like cars like this, otherwise Toyota wouldn't be building it. Let's face it, the Yaris Cross is unlikely to change your world. You won't be beating any supercars or any of its rivals off the line, given it's 0-62 time. Well, unless they spontaneously go on fire. But what it is, is good looking, practical, clever. It'll do everything you want it to do on the day-to-day without any fuss at all. It'll do all of that while being amazingly efficient in a really clever way. Hello internet, me again. Hopefully you enjoyed that lovely film on the Toyota Yaris Cross. If you liked it, why not have a look at other films with small SUVs in them, or why not a massive SUV? DBX707, that's an SUV and it's massive and it's really good fun. As ever, don't forget to like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you next time.