Toyota Yaris First Drive Review: Should the Honda City Be Worried?
The Toyota Yaris premium sedan will be launching soon in India. Here’s our first drive review.
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Toyota has an SUV, an entry-level sedan, a premium sedan, a hatchback and an MUV in India. The Fortuner and Innova have been runaway successes. But the Japanese are now adding the Yaris, a premium-midsize sedan to its portfolio, which goes up against the Honda City and Hyundai Verna.
That’s a highly competitive, yet almost saturated market. Can Toyota with its Yaris offer some breath of fresh air? Here’s our first drive review of the upcoming Toyota Yaris.
Design
Yaris has all the imprints of a car quite unlike what Toyota usually makes. It’s clearly targeted at the premium customer, who likes his sedan to be simple, yet packed with features.
The exterior touches have a sense of elegance about them, not very aggressive in its demeanour, which is a refreshing change in a segment which believes in doling out chrome by the bucketful. Clean lines, flowing to the rear end of the car, is reminiscent of what we have seen with the Toyota Corolla over the years.
The front grille is unconventional and is flanked by DRLs (day-time running lights) and projector headlamps on the side. You get fog lamps at the lower corners on the front and rear bumpers as well. The mesh underneath the Toyota badge ensures the heat dissipates quickly.
On the inside, plush leather seating welcomes you (top-end variant), and the company’s waterfall design approach is apparent in the dashboard. The use of material inside the car doesn’t feel cheap and for its segment, we expect nothing different.
For a sedan, Yaris does look compact, with a narrower track in front, which gets wider by the time you look at the back of the car. Toyota claims that 5 people can sit inside the Yaris comfortably. But I'm not sure about that. It does feel a bit narrow inside.
Power
Being a Toyota sedan, Yaris gets a single engine option, but four variants to choose from. All four will come with automatic transmission, while the manual transmission will be available on the first three, for a total of seven variant options.
The car packs a 1.5-litre petrol engine offering 107 PS of power and 140 Nm of torque. You can choose between a 6-speed manual transmission or a 7-speed CVT (constantly variable transmission). This enables a lot of parts-sharing between other sedans in the Toyota fold such as the Etios and Corolla Altis.
We did check with the company whether Yaris is Bharat Stage (BS) VI fuel compliant from day one, but didn’t get any response from them (will update when we do).
The overall performance of the Yaris was equally measured on the highway as well as city roads during our 200-km test drive and it’s fair to say that the car doesn’t really thrill with the speed on offer. However, it’s good enough to keep chugging on your daily work routine.
Feature-Packed Sedan
Let me put it this way, the feature-list of the Yaris is a long one and you get a lot of first-in-segment features as well. You get 7 airbags, electronic-adjustable front seat (CVT model), hill-assist control, ABS (anti-lock braking system) with EBD (electronic brake force distribution) for safety and gesture control support for using the 7.2-inch infotainment screen.
You can even pull out the touch-screen display to put in your CDs or connect via SD card. There’s cruise control, roof-mounted rear AC vent, front & rear parking sensors and some more that your Toyota showroom salesman will berate you with.
Having said that, Yaris does not get a sunroof and no support for Apple Carplay or Android Auto either. Cup-holders are placed wherever it is deemed fit, including somewhere near the gearshift, which does come in handy.
Fair to say that Toyota is heavily banking on this feature-packed sedan to click with buyers.
Driving the Yaris
We drove both the CVT as well as the manual variant of the Yaris and our general bias was towards the former. The pleasure of having to drive an automatic gear-controlled car in city traffic like ours could push many consumers to pay that premium to get the CVT variant, and that wouldn’t be a bad idea.
With the CVT unit in place, the gear transition while accelerating is hard to notice and driving at low RPM doesn’t feel discouraging either. Noise level inside the car has been kept to a minimum, something that Toyota proudly claimed during its product presentation and we can surely vouch for that.
The car can hold itself well in tough road conditions, ably helped by the suspension which Toyota claims has an unconventional shock-absorber treatment. Yaris can easily tackle bumps and potholes, and even with 15-inch wheels, you don't feel the car slipping away anytime.
The brakes on the car have also been tuned to tackle the surprises of errant vehicles or pedestrians on Indian roads. They did show their worth during our time on the road.
The 6-speed variant is a mixed bag though. The gearbox in its initial stretch does feel a bit clunky, picking up the pace only after you cross the third gear. We’re not sure if this was an issue only in our car, but hopefully Toyota can tune it better before the launch.
What We Think
Toyota has made a fine attempt with the Yaris, which is going to face some hefty competition from giants like Honda, Hyundai and Maruti Suzuki. It has got all the attributes and even more for a sedan in this segment and the added feature-set could work in its favour. The 1.5-litre petrol (only) variant will come with 6-speed manual or 7-speed CVT option.
The overall drive quality of the Yaris was impressive, quiet inside the car, stable at high speed and effective with its braking and handling of bumps. However, it’ll be hard to call the Yaris as a spacious sedan and that's something buyers need to think about. For us, it’s got almost everything a buyer would need. Now it just needs to get the right sticker price.
With the reputation Toyota has built for itself, the competition should sit up and take notice.
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