Monday, April 12, 2010

A month with the Kitchen Appliance

I should perhaps have been a motoring journalist. I probably wouldn't make any money though. So here, without much further ado, my experiences with a 2007 Diesel Corolla.

The Kitchen Appliance is my pet name for this white car. Yes, it has been recalled. No, its not a death trap, unless you're American.

Let me start with some of the irritations, most of them mild. I will compare it with my previous vehicle, although this comparison is unfair to some extend.

Predictably perhaps, the boot, or more specifically, the boot lid. Surely Toyota has heard of something called a gas strut? They must have, they actually used them on their hatch models. This car is in serious need of gas struts or something similar on the boot, for the simple reason that the wind closes it, sometimes on top of your head.

Automatic door locking is missing. It will moan with the usual beeping if you forget to put a seatbelt on and go faster than 20km/h, but it won't lock the doors for you. The BMW locked itself at 16km/h, which was nice. In the same line, the double-lock feature, activated by pressing the lock button twice, should be the default, as it is on the BMW. The single lock feature, apparently meant for leaving other living creatures such as a wife or a dog in the vehicle, should be activated with a second button press.

Another thing that is missing, is phased unlocking: unlock the drivers door on the first button press, and the other doors on the second. This is not a new concept: The 1997-2002 GLE already had it.

Like the BMW, the Toyota has 4 settings for intermittent wiper control. The BMW adds another touch of detail though, if you switch to a higher speed setting, the BMW will immediately wipe the windscreen, which makes sense: You decided to increase the speed precisely because it was too slow, which means it is probably in need of a wipe right now. The Toyota doesn't do this, which points to a much simpler control unit.

When you close a window on the BMW, using the one-touch function, the window will stop moving if you open a door. The one-touch function also doesn't work in the up direction if the door is open, but it does work in the down direction. It is obvious that someone realised that you are more likely to get your fingers caught in the window if you close the window while getting out of the vehicle. On the Toyota, there is of course none of this. It has one-touch only on the drivers window, and it is not perturbed in any way by your opening of the door.

Getting into some of the settings of the onboard computer is non-intuitive, and fiddly. Setting the clock on a BMW is done by twisting the button to the left and to the right, not something you would guess, but very easy once you know about it, which usually only happens after you consulted the manual. On the Toyota you click through several options using the right-hand button, cycling though Odo, Trip A, Trip B, Setup. It seems odd to have Setup here, I would expect it to pop up if I held the button down or something, since it is not something I would use on a daily basis (but a trip counter is). Once in the Setup menu, you hit the button for a short period to cycle through the options, then hold it down to select clock. Okay so far, but now you have to set the hours. You glance down to your watch to see what time it is, and when you look up, you see that it has moved on to the minutes. You do not get to confirm your selection, instead it sees your inaction as confirmation that you are done setting that part of the clock, and moves on. Luckily I do not set the clock every day, but whenever I do, I go through the process a few times before I get it right.

Staying with the instrument cluster, when you turn the lights on, it dims the optitron instruments, which is expected and right. However, it dims it so much that should you want to drive with your lights on during the day time, as you would on some cloudy days, you cannot read the instrumentation. You can however adjust the brightness, once again using the right-hand button on the cluster, which now has an additional brightness option added in after Setup, once again requiring that you hold the button down while it jumps through the various brightness levels. If I need to do this at 100km/h, I would much prefer a turning a button, like I would on a Honda Jazz for example.

Finally, having some kind of backlighting on the lock buttons on the drivers door handle would help find the lock button at night, since that is now the only way to quickly lock all your doors at night.

With that out of the way, here is why I like it. Predictably once again starting with the boot. Its HUGE! And yes, it has a full size spare, although it is a steel wheel. On a recent trip to the karoo, I managed to fit all our luggage, all the baby's toys AND the stroller in the boot.

It also has a flat floor inside. This is a side effect of being front wheel driven, which is another compromise I had to accept when I downgraded from the BMW, but the lack of a transmission tunnel adds some space in the back.

The sound system is brilliant. The BMW's stock system, at least in the E46 (the 5-series has a much better system), isn't particularly good and never really impressed me, but the Toyota's stock system is much better.

At only 93kw compared to the BMW's 110kw, its no speedster, but it has plenty of torque and acceleration isn't so much noticed by the way your spine is mashed into the seat than it is by just watching the instrumentation. Against the clock, its your usual 0-100km/h in 10 seconds car, which is almost hot-hatch territory. Overtaking takes a cog-swap or two to keep it in the torque band, unless of course you are in the habit of breaking the national speed limit (Don't do this near Laingsburg!), in which case a cog-swap is not necessary and 120km/h to 160km/h passes before you fully comprehend it.

It is also somewhat lighter on fuel than the BMW was, probably as a result of the 6-speed gearbox (A comparison with the e46 2004 M-speed model, which had a 6-speed box, would have been more fair, admittedly).

Finally, most of the mild irritations can be rationalised away, if you want. Most of the nice functions of the BMW is controlled by a single computer, a part which does occasionally fail on some vehicles, leaving your wipers, electric windows and headlights non-operational, and which costs an arm and half a leg to replace. The non-integration of these functions on the Toyota is likely because they took the less complex option, something I am quite happy with as long as I keep my fingers out of the electric windows. I can get used to many things, even the odd instrumentation. I will remind myself that multi-speed intermittent wipers are really only available on executive vehicles (or on cheaper models that have to try harder, eg Mazda 3) and that having it at ALL on this vehicle is nice. And I just have to reprogram my lazy-ex-BMW-driver self to lock the doors, which thankfully can be done with a single button press, where my other vehicles had to by locked and unlocked by hand. Ad I will do this all in the name of a more family-oriented and practical vehicle.

But I really hope that Toyota will at least give some attention to the locking and instrument cluster in newer models.