Driving in the United Kingdom, I discovered, is not as entertaining as it is here, because there’s so much traffic that you rarely get a chance to speed — and when you do, Big Brother is watching. Signs light up and chant “You’re gonna go to the devil!” when you exceed the speed limit by two miles per hour.
Cameras lurk on virtually every corner, with wires leading directly to your wallet, to punish you should you transgress. Yet, strangely enough, getting about on British roads isn’t as safe as you’d expect. The Poms, with a population of 59-million, lose about 6Â 000 lives per year in road accidents. We kill about 10Â 000 of our 45-million citizens every year, which seems pretty bad until you consider that we drive vast distances at high speed along pedestrian-cluttered highways, and these people make up about half of our fatalities.
The Poms’ overall average speed is something like 14km/h, with nary a pedestrian to be seen outside of the cities. Maybe we’re not such bad drivers after all!
Anyway, enough of the rant! What about the car we drove in the UK prior to its arrival here as the successor to the Toyota RunX?
Toyota says it stood back and had a total rethink when designing the Auris. Where previous “C” segment hatches were based on the world’s bestselling passenger car, the Corolla, the men in suits felt the time had come for a change. The RunX went part way to developing its own “now generation” identity, but the Auris needed to make an even greater departure from the Corolla recipe, despite sharing a common basic platform and drive-train.
The Auris — pronounced “Owris”, according to the Brits, who should know, because they built it — reminds me of a grown-up Yaris from the outside. The interior is spacious and the instrumentation and dash layout funky, with a 3-D effect brought about by layered gauges. For me the effect was modern and attractive but somewhat marred by the use of brittle plastic in places — perhaps the “now generation” will feel differently about that.
The Toyota UK team told us that the few product problems brought to their attention by JD Power Customer Satisfaction Surveys relate very often to unidentified interior noise. The Brits have set up a rough paving section and trained final-inspection personnel to test every single car rigorously for offending rattles and squeaks as it rolls off the line in Burnaston in Derbyshire.
The Auris buyer in South Africa will be able to choose from three engines when the car arrives here next month — 1,6- and 1,8-litre petrol units, and a two-litre turbo diesel. The petrol units both feature Toyota’s latest Dual VVT-i (variable valve timing — intelligent) and both offer better performance and fuel consumption than the units they replace — 91kW at 6Â 000rpm and 157Nm at 5Â 200rpm for the 1,6-litre, and 100kW at 6Â 000rpm and 175Nm at 4Â 400rpm for the 1,8-litre. The diesel produces a respectable 93kW at 3Â 600rpm, with a very satisfying 300Nm of torque being available between 2Â 000rpm and 2Â 800rpm.
A 200km drive can easily take five hours on a motorway, and forever if you wander off on to the narrow country roads in the UK. Our route to Winchester where we were staying, via the excellent Beaulieu Motor Museum near Southampton, encompassed both sets of conditions and thus took much longer than it should have, with only one aggressive speed-limit sign bellowing at me to slow down — I was doing 33 miles per hour in a 30 zone.
The trip was meant to be punctuated by two car changes, but the blighters who were supposed to hand us the Brit-spec 1,4-litre Auris went AWOL, so my experience was limited to the 1,6-litre petrol and the diesel. Both were excellent performers under English conditions, and I suspect they will prove just as rewarding when launched here on roads that can fully exploit their potential.
Toyota told us that its experience with the Auris has been that people lift their opinion of the car once they’ve been lured inside. The exterior styling of the hatch is certainly not enormously more striking than that of other Toyotas, but the interior is very different to what went before, and will, I believe, be much more appealing to younger buyers than that of earlier cars.
The Auris is spacious, ergonomically well laid out and a lively performer on the road — all attributes likely to appeal to anybody, irrespective of age. Now we just have to wait for the South African pricing …