2017 Toyota Corolla vs 2018

What's the difference?

The Corolla Ascent Sport hatch's looks, driveability, and optional advanced safety equipment mean that despite the fact it's older than most of its rivals, it's still a great buy.

Toyota seems to be mostly waking up to what it takes to cut through in the contemporary car market. While the local arm sits on a pretty big pile of brand loyalty forged over years of delivering a solid-if-unspectacular product, its lunch is danger of being eaten by the various mouths of its rivals.

Have a good look at a Hyundai from 10 or more years ago - an attempt to clone Toyota's middle-of-the-road approach. Now they're a distinct brand with a strong focus on styling, dynamics and equipment. Toyota has grabbed two of those values and is lurching towards getting the third right.

Toyota will sell a squillion of these and probably for the first time I won't be wracking my brains trying to remember what it's like to drive. And while it's missing a few obvious bits and pieces, and the hybrid is very slow, the new car confirms how good TNGA is. Maybe, just maybe, Toyota is finally breaking free of building boring cars.

This current Corolla has been around five years and it still looks great thanks to a good initial design and successful styling updates along the way.

I like the sharp nose, the sleek headlights, the profile, even the ‘egg splat' tail-lights. The hatch is so much more attractive than the sedan, but struggles a bit in the beauty stakes against the new Mazda3 and Hyundai i30.

Measuring 4330mm end to end, 1475mm tall and 1760mm wide, the Corolla hatch is 290mm shorter, 15mm narrower but 15mm taller than the sedan.

Inside, the cabin has barely changed in years, but I'm still a big fan of its swooping dash and clean design. The new touchscreen modernises the interior, the instrument cluster is clear, grown up and stylish, while the blue lighting throughout is a great ambient touch.

There are eight paint colours to choose from for the Ascent Sport (only four for the Ascent). As mentioned our car was 'Inferno' (a burnt orange) but there are seven other colours to choose from including 'Blue Gem', 'Citrus', 'Crystal Pearl', 'Silver Pearl', 'Ink' (black), 'Wildfire' (bushfire blonde) and 'Glacier White', which I happen to like the most, and not just because it's free.

Well, here's something - a Corolla with genuine character. I'm not completely convinced (styling is subjective after all) but this is certainly a Corolla you can say is good looking.

The front is aggressive - particularly here in the ZR - with the right number of lines rather than the overdone designs of some other Toyotas. The big 18-inch wheels add a bit of dynamic tension to the look, its backside is almost shapely and the profile quite wedgy.

The bit that gets me is where the rear doors meet the C-pillar. It looks like the design team couldn't work out how to make it elegant, so they just closed their eyes and hoped for the best. Bit of a shame, really, given the clarity of the rest of the car.

The cabin is a huge step forward. Contemporary and shapely rather than a cheap plastic cliff face, it makes all the right moves and is made of good materials. The seats are absurdly sporty and equally comfortable, although even up here in the ZR they feature manual adjudstment.

The interior is so good that small, unfortunate details jar, like the clumsily placed seat-heater switches, which look and feel like they're straight out of a 1988 Toyota Crown. The big 8.0-inch screen dominates the dash with almost cinematic scale.

Wondering if the Corolla hatch is more practical than the sedan? No, of course you weren't. So, consider it trivia that the hatch has far less rear legroom (at 191cm tall I can just squeeze in behind my driving position) but more headroom back there.

The boot is smallish at 310 litres (110 litres less than the sedan), but it will fit the CarsGuide pram, just. The hatch tailgate gives you a bigger opening than a sedan boot and by folding the seats forward the car is better for cargo carrying.

Storage inside is not bad with two cupholders in the fold down centre armrest in the back, and two more up front, plus bottle holders in all of the doors. The centre console bin upfront is deep but, not large because the handbrake eats into the space. There's also a small hidey hole in the dash under aircon dials for bits and pieces.

The new machine has a few more centimetres in each direction, but not many of them have been lavished on the occupants. Front-seat passengers have plenty of space but I did feel like the chunky dashboard towards the right-hand side makes getting in a bit more of a job than it perhaps should be.

Rear-seat passengers really aren't as well looked after as they are in some of the Corolla's rivals because those front seats - as brilliant as they are - have super-chunky backs. All of that bulk means it's pretty tight for me, all of 180cm, to sit behind my own driving position. My beanpole son wasn't a particularly happy camper back there, with his head brushing the ceiling and legs akimbo.

Front and rear-seat passengers score a pair of cupholders each and every door has a bottle holder. In the ZR you get a Qi wireless-charging pad, which is super handy if you have the right phone except you don't get a "Your phone is still in the vehicle" message, which would be good because you can't really see the phone once its in there.

The boot is pretty ho-hum in the rest of the range at 217 litres, but as the ZR goes without a spare tyre, there's a rather more generous 333 litres.

Straight off the bat, the top-of-the-range ZR with hybrid drivetrain is a surprisingly sharp $31,870, just $1500 more than the standard ZR. We start the list with 18-inch alloy wheels, moving on with an eight-speaker stereo, reversing camera, dual-zone climate control (with vents in the back - luxury!), keyless entry and start, active cruise control, sat nav, bi-LED headlights (and they are superb), heated front seats, head-up display, heated and folding electric mirrors and a tyre-repair kit.

With two rows of cheap and tiny buttons, the screen isn't particularly premium-feeling.

A huge 8.0-inch screen runs the eight-speaker stereo with USB, Bluetooth and DAB and (deep breath) still no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The screen's resolution is a bit muddy - it looks like Toyota has stretched an interface to fit the space. It's a better head unit than the rubbish one in Honda's C-HR and, for example, the Toyota 86, but with two rows of cheap and tiny buttons, not particularly premium-feeling.

All Corollas, sedan or hatch, regardless of grade, come with the same engine. It's a petrol, a 1.8-litre four-cylinder with a power output of 103kW (torque is 173Nm). Actually that's not true. There's a petrol-electric hybrid Corolla hatch. Did you know that? Here, read my road test.

Okay, back to the Corolla Ascent Sport. You have two transmission choices: a six-speed manual and seven-speed CVT auto. Ours was the CVT, and if you're looking for something which shifts automatically and smoothly, go for this one. But if you're really into driving, you'll want the manual.

Hybrid Corollas, as the name suggests, feature Toyota's hybrid powertrain. While the non-hybrid cars run a 125kW four-cylinder, this one has a 1.8-litre with a small battery and a modest electric motor.

As is usual, power output isn't especially straightfoward, so here goes. The 1.8 spins up 72kW/142Nm, which isn't a lot, but the electric motor brings 53kW/190Nm for a combined total system output of 90kW/190Nm.

That's not a huge chunk of power to push 1420kg along, let's be honest.

The e-CVT auto looks after getting the power to the front wheels. The system recharges the small battery when you lift off and when you're on the brakes, with an indicator to tell you what's happening in both in head-up display and the multimedia screen.

The Corolla Ascent Sport we tested had the seven-speed CVT auto. These transmissions are known for their efficiency, but lack a sporty personality. When you ask them for more acceleration, they tend to drone noisily, rather than dramatically increase your speed.

Toyota says that the hatch with a CVT should consume 6.1L/100km of regular unleaded petrol for the combined (urban, extra-urban) fuel economy cycle. That's more efficient than the same engine in the sedan, which gets 6.6L/100km. We took our car on mainly urban adventures/chores and saw 11.5L/100km.

Being happy to drink the cheap 91 RON petrol should make filling the 50 litre tank easier on the budget, too.

The Corolla Hybrid's claimed combined fuel consumption figure is 4.2L/100km, which is the kind of number we've all heard before. Happily, a week with me saw the ZR return 5.2L/100km. I was not gentle, either. I'm genuinely impressed.

Surely if something has the word 'sport' in its name it has to be sporty, or connected to sport or performance in some way. You know deodorant, or a watch, or trousers. Not so with cars. Nope the Ascent Sport is in no way faster or higher-performance or sportier than the Ascent or any other Corolla grade. It doesn't even have a stripe down the side of it.

So, if you're buying it because you want performance or better handling, forget it, and buy a Toyota 86, which doesn't have the word sport in its name at all, but is possibly the best sports cars for Corolla money on the planet.

Driving the Ascent Sport is easy: easy to park, easy to see out of, easy to use, with enough power to overtake easily. The ride is comfortable and the handling is good for a small car. I'll be honest with you though, the Mazda3 Maxx is more fun to drive, and so is the Hyundai i30.

That's mainly because both have traditional autos, which feel more responsive, and it's also down to small tactile things, which make a big difference, such as the steering wheel shape. The Mazda and Hyundai's felt fitted to my hands, while the Corolla's is hard to grip comfortably. Handling is not bad, but it's not as agile as the Mazda3.

Then there are those the headlights. They're halogen, and adequate, but could be brighter. The LED headlights on the ZR grade are excellent, but you'll have to pay more to step up to that spec to get them.

First, let me say this car is quite slow. Despite its warm-hatch clothes, it's all mouth. A flattened throttle produces a reasonably smart step off the line with the electric motor's assistance, but after that it's mostly hydrocarbons and the CVT lawnmower effect.

Does it matter? Not really. As I've already covered, it's extremely light on the fuel and it's not often that you get that big a trade-off. It's also very quiet and if you jam a tennis ball under the accelerator you can switch to EV mode and maybe get two kilometres under electric power.

The new Corolla is by far the best I've driven. Even the previous model was pretty dull to drive, with little feel and a fairly ho-hum approach to ride and handling. It was so middle of the road Toyota may as well have painted double white lines along the car's centreline. The new car moves closer to the correct side of the road, the one where you don't forget what you're driving while you're driving it.

That doesn't mean the new Corolla has the dynamic poise of a Hyundai i30, because it doesn't. The front suspension is by the usual McPherson struts and the multi-link rear goes a long way to explaining the improvements but it's also down to the new platform, known as Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), already found under the C-HR.

The TNGA platform has delivered a lower centre of gravity, which is critial in helping make the car feel a bit more tied down to the road. It's also stiffer, meaning it's quieter and despite having a ride-focused suspension tune, is reasonably handy in the corners. The 18-inch alloys on the ZR probably have a bit to do with that, along with wider tyres than the lower models.

(if ANCAP rated, stipulate when it was most recently tested)

The ZR has seven airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls, forward AEB with pedestrian detection and cyclist detection (during the day, curiously), reversing camera, adaptive cruise, lane-departure warning, lane-keep assist, traffic-sign recognition and active cornering control. There are two ISOFIX points and three top-tether anchor points.

Most of that gear is available across the range, which is impressive. Bizarrely, there are no rear parking sensors (or front ones, for that matter) which seems to be a Toyota and Subaru thing.

ANCAP awarded a maximum five-star safety rating in August 2018, just after its launch.

The Corolla Ascent Sport hatch is covered by a three year/100,000km warranty. Servicing is recommended every six months or 10,000km and is capped at $140 per visit up to 36 months or 60,000km.

Toyota's three-year/100,000km warranty is still with us. Just about every other competitor (except Volkswagen) has five years or more. You can buy up to a further three years and 150,000km if you want to bridge the gap.

The servicing regime is much better, though. Intervals are now 12 months/15,000km (previously it was every 6 months/10,000km) and for the first five years/75,000km, each service is $175 a pop.

Roadside assist is further $78 per year.