Toyota Yaris - Engines, performance and drive
The Toyota Yaris should be quick enough in city traffic, plus it’s easy to drive. Look elsewhere for fun, though.
The Toyota Yaris is a competent all-rounder, offering a reasonable drive on a variety of roads. But it’s around town where the hybrid supermini shows off the best of its talents. The steering feels precise, and the Yaris is easily manoeuvred around the tightest of turns, so parking up in narrow spaces should prove to be straightforward.
Although largely untroubled by higher speeds, the Yaris feels a little strained when on the motorway, and the CVT transmission isn’t the most involving when pressing on through twisty B-roads – becoming quite noisy under hard acceleration due to the revs flaring as you build speed. The setup is better suited to more measured inputs, which makes for a relaxing and smooth drive.
The Yaris suspension arrangement is a very typical layout compared to the sportier GR Yaris, comprising MacPherson struts at the front and a torsion beam at the rear. It’s pretty agreeable, but it does crash through the worst of potholes, and becomes unsettled over uneven, broken surfaces.
Like its Honda Jazz and Renault Clio E-Tech rivals, the Yaris can drive on electric power alone for short periods of time during low-speed urban runs, although we’ve found you need to be really gentle with the accelerator to achieve this.
A key advantage of the Toyota hybrid system is that you don’t have to stop to plug in and recharge, or trail an extension cord to your car to top it up overnight. Instead, the Yaris’s battery pack is ‘refilled’ by a regenerative braking function, which produces electricity when you brake or coast. Excess power from the engine is also used to charge the battery.
0-62mph acceleration and top speed
The Yaris’s hybrid system delivers a total of 114bhp and, combined with a relatively low kerb weight of 1,085kg, manages the 0-62mph sprint in a reasonable 9.7 seconds. Top speed is 108mph, but that’s not a figure many Yaris customers will be actively trying to match. It’s not that kind of car.
We mentioned above that a more powerful 128bhp version will be coming. We know it’ll drop the acceleration time down to 9.2 seconds, but Toyota has also told us it’ll improve acceleration times once on the move, so we take it that this version will make overtaking easier.
