Comments:
The Toyota Corolla Verso is a pretty beautiful car, with a great safety score at the EuroNCAP tests.
When you stand next to the car you find yourself standing next to a family car with a sleek and sporty look, that says that this car is entirely desirable.
It’s just a shame that it has been so poorly designed as a family car. It has every sense of having been designed by a man who wanted a family car to seem sporty, while entirely forgetting that a family car also needs to be practical. Even on the Toyota website, they do everything to sell the car on its looks - you have to really dig just to find a basic description.
The first concern is - storage, what storage? No underfloor compartments, no underseat compartments - in fact, just a boot and a glovebox, and that’s it.
However, the most horrific part of this car as a family car is that the windows slope up towards the rear of the car. This means that if you have any children riding in the back, they are unlikely to be able to see properly out of the windows. For children, riding in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla Verso would almost certainly be like riding in a featureless box. And you definitely do not want that in long jounreys.
And if you think I’m being unnecessarily critical about this point, simply check out the Toyota Corolla Verso accessories booklet, specifically the page about child safety seats - and note the picture of a boy, approximately 10 years old, sat on a booster seat - who *still* can’t even see properly out of the back windows.
The Toyota Corolla Verso remains a very sleek and smooth looking car - from the outside. From the inside, you are in a badly-thought out machine that you most certainly would not want to take children on any length of journey in.
A very safe car but not at all designed with the modern family in mind - and very safely removed from my list of purchase options.
Description:
From the Toyota Corolla Verso webpage:
If you enjoy the many strands that make up the diverse fabric of contemporary living, you’re already well acquainted with the Verso concept. It’s all about being smart, innovative, and versatile. Verso is all of these things… and more.
With it’s athletic design and ingenious modularity, it combines dynamic looks and class leading safety with comfortable, flexible seating for up to seven people, enabling you to live life to the full.
An uncompromising approach to life requires intelligent thinking and an outstanding talent for organisation, and that’s exactly what the Verso delivers. With the versatility offered by the Toyota Easy Flat-7 seat system it is easy to accommodate seven people comfortably across three rows.
Specifications:
Typical with the Verso sales pitch, you can see a Flash image of the car, but any kind of specifications are denigrated into some throwaway PDF file. Toyota seem desperate to sell on exterior appearance alone.
Safety:
The Toyota Corolla Verso scored very impressively at the EuroNCAP tests - scoring 5 in general and 4 on child safety.
Additionally, there was no real threat of even minor injuries to the majority of the driver’s body in the frontal impact test.
Overall, not quite just a pretty face.
