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| The new Corolla hatch: not designed for grandma no more. |
TOYOTA this week launched a new Corolla in the U.S., and its nothing like the Corolla grandma is still driving back home.
Calling this one a “haute hatch”, Toyota’s engineers can rightfully boast to have achieved truly impressive efficiencies from the lighter, stiffer body and the all new, lighter, two-litre engine.
Torsional rigidity is improved a massive 60% compared to its predecessor.
Translated into something grandma will understand, if you load her and two friends for a few quick
turns around a race track and then ask her how they found the ride, she’ll answer “some speed, some’s pood and some’s passed out!”
turns around a race track and then ask her how they found the ride, she’ll answer “some speed, some’s pood and some’s passed out!”
The front suspension has the usual MacPherson struts but the rear — for so long the space where the bean counters saved money with ye olde torsion beam — now features multi-link suspension with stabiliser bar.
The end result, according to a Toyota statement, is “a Corolla hatchback that possesses an uncanny blend of balance, composure, and feel that’ll have its driver pining for windy roads”.
This will make a welcome change from any old Corolla on the road today, in which the driver only seems to be “pining for the fjords”, as in Monty Python’s dead parrot skit.
Clever valves cleave fuel bill
The heart of all this fun-to-driveness, says Toyota, is the new two-litre Dynamic-Force direct-injection in-line four-cylinder engine, burdened with the name M20A-FKS. Toyota’s latest D-4S fuel-injection uses high-pressure direct-injection and low-pressure port fuel injection (PFI) to force just enough drops of fuel into each cylinder.
The engine also features dual variable valve timing-intelligence (VVT-i) on the exhaust, with variable valve timing-intelligence by electric motor (VVT-iE) on the intake side. Another notable improvement to this engine is the longer stroke, which does for torque what Archimedes said he could do with a long enough lever — it moves the earth.
Translated for grandma, this means you can shove the Corolla into fifth and leave it there while the clever valve systems use that torque uphill and reduce the fuel downhill, cutting emissions as well as the fuel bill. The really impressive number from this petrol engine, however, is its diesel-like compression ratio of 13:1. Higher compression means the petrol engine, which throws away some 80% of the energy in each litre of fuel, wastes less of our heavily taxed petrol.
Engine that runs on sugar
With South Africa being Toyota’s biggest market in Africa, we are sure to get the new Corolla sooner rather than later, but there is another Toyota that will work even better in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
It is basically a Prius with a robust little petrol engine, but it comes with the fancy title “Hybrid FFV” — for Flexible-Fuel Vehicle. The little petrol engine runs smooth on petrol or methanol made from sugar cane — what we call Cane Mainstay in SA — and Toyota hopes the citizens of Sao Paulo in Brazil will buy all this flexibility in droves.
The pilot project involves government, universities, and Brazil’s sugarcane association. As more people in SA discover sugar is extremely addictive and very harmful to their health, as is now shown by diabetes being the second biggest killer of women in South Africa after TB, our sugar cane farmers may want to start growing biomass to distill into fuel, rather than refine the cane into a habit-forming white powder that kills us.
