2021 Toyota Corolla Hatchback

[MUSIC PLAYING] ELANA SCHERR: Toyota's marketing of the 2019 Corolla has been a focus on youth and fun. It's available in a hatchback, and hatchbacks are fun. But can the Corolla really escape its dull reputation and compete with cars like the Veloster and the Mazda 3? I have to say, I was kind of dreading doing this review. Like, ugh, Corolla. What is there even to say? It's like a boring car, right? It's just boring. But then I saw this. Hello, hatchback. And it's a six-speed? And look at that color? You could call the 2019 Corolla XSE a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. I'm going to show you just how exciting the Corolla is. But first, subscribe to our channel. And if you're shopping for a car, visit Edmunds. For years, we've been giving Toyota a hard time about designing bland cars. And now, the new Toyotas-- the Corolla, in particular-- are full of body lines, and dips, and bulges-- it's definitely not bland. But just because something isn't boring doesn't mean that it's attractive. The big mouth front end is growing on me. I kind of like it. But the back-- well, the kind of thing I can say about the back is that it looks like a robot with an underbite. It's not that pretty. What is pretty, though, is this color. Toyota calls it blue flame, and it is like driving a summer sky. You know, so many of us live in these dull, gray, concrete worlds. Why not add a little pop of color to your commute? I took some friends out to lunch in the Corolla, and they got inside. And both of them were like, oh, this is nice. And since they showed up in Porsches, I'm going to assume they knew something about nice interiors. I'm not going to say that the interior is as nice as a Porsche, but there's soft-touch materials where previous generations had hard plastic. There's a lot of really nice details, like stitching, interesting different textures, these great seats with a pattern in them. And for $25,000, this is well-dressed. The seats in the Corolla are really comfortable. In fact, the whole front of the cabin is spacious. There's plenty of room, plenty of personal space between you and your passenger. The seats are just bolstered enough to be comfortable if you're going around a corner, but they're not real tight-fitting like a race seat. And the seats go up far enough that I can put the clutch in without ramming my knee into the dash, and I still have plenty of space. It's super comfortable. It really makes this car a joy to drive. While there's plenty of room for people in the front of the Corolla, there's not a whole lot of room for stuff. The cup holders are small. There's only one little pocket for a phone, and it's kind of inconveniently out of the way. Console's pretty tiny, and there's not a lot of space in the side pockets for the doors, either. Also, I do have a little rant, which is about USB ports. There are two USB ports in the Corolla-- one in the console, where you would expect it to be, but that one doesn't connect to Apple CarPlay. The one that connects to Apple CarPlay is all the way over on the passenger side. And you can't even see it from the driver's seat, so it's a little weird. It's only going to be a problem once when you first get the car, but it would've been nice if they'd made it a bright color, or just a little bit more obvious. This is not a problem for you if you use Android Auto because Toyota doesn't support Android Auto. Although there are rumors they might in the future. Anyway, rant over. Oh, no, wait. I have another rant. The eight-inch touchscreen display for the infotainment is fine. I mean, it's well-placed. It doesn't get all glary. But the actual infotainment system for Toyota is, like, what are they thinking? None of it really makes sense. It takes so many clicks to get anything done. For example, if you want to just adjust the volume for the navigation directions, in most cars, you can do that with the volume knob. You just do it when a direction is being spoken, and it doesn't change your music or anything like that. But in the Corolla, you've got to go to-- OK. It's Menu, Setup, Voice, Voice Volume, and then you can click it up and down. That's like four or five clicks to adjust something that you might need to adjust while you were driving. For a car that won't even let you release the parking brake unless you have the foot on the brake, I was sort of surprised they made it that complicated. Toyota's safety suite all comes standard, so you get things like pedestrian detection, and lane departure assist, backup camera, a bunch of airbags, everything you need. Here's what you get in the backseat of the Corolla. You have a very comfortable seat, enough leg room for a night out on the town, although you might not want to live in the backseat, especially if you're tall. I think you might run out of headroom. You've got an armrest, cupholders, there's another cupholder in the door, a little slot for putting phones or change or very, very small pets. Here's what you don't have-- a USB port. I guess you can use the one in the console since you can't use that to use Apple CarPlay in the front. I would not use it for five people unless you were in an emergency, because this middle seat is really, really tight. The new Corolla hatch is wider, lower, and shorter than the previous one, and that mostly affects cargo space. There's 17.8 cubic feet back here, and that's a lot less than the competition. The Civic hatch has 22 cubic feet. And even the Veloster, which is small, has 19.9. Do you want to see a magic trick? I'm going to take this perfectly adequate commuter car Corolla and make it super fun. Ready? Ta-da, it's a stick. When people say that driving a stick is more fun than an automatic, that is absolutely the case. That's why it's so exciting to see a stick shift available in a car at a very low price point. If you used to own a stick shift, and you haven't in a long time because you just didn't feel like there was a sensible daily driver car that offered one, right here, guys. And if you've always sort of wanted to drive a stick, but you've been intimidated by it, or just seems too scary, this is the easiest manual car I've ever driven. I've been driving this car all week long. I am not kidding. I've put about 600 miles on it in one week-- a lot of traffic, a lot of hills, all the things that somebody who's new to driving a manual might be intimidated by. And not one time have I wished that it was the automatic transmission. Not once. I'm going to say that the most intimidating thing about driving a stick is what do you do when you're on a hill? Because you stop, and then if you let off the brake, you're going to roll backwards. Oh, my god. What if there's somebody behind you? Well, modern stick shift cars are great because first of all, it automatically has a hill assist. So there's a moment where you can let off the gas and it'll hold it for you. Like I was off the brake for about a second before we started rolling back. But let's say you need more than that, like a second isn't enough time. Well, we've got a hold button, and it'll hold the brakes indefinitely. I am not on the brakes right now. I'm on the clutch, not on the brakes, not on the gas. And then we're ready to go. It automatically releases, and we're moving. Where was this when I was learning to drive stick? It's stuff like this that makes this car such a perfect city run-about car because everything that would have made you not want it as a daily driver, or not want to stick shift as a daily driver before-- irrelevant. They have solved all of your problems. If you just write out the specs for this car, it doesn't seem very impressive. It's a 2-liter 4-cylinder. It's not turbocharged. It's naturally aspirated. And it only makes 168 horsepower, which isn't very much compared to the competition. Both the Civic SI and the Veloster have quite a bit more. But everything in the Corolla is perfectly balanced that it makes it a lot of fun, even if it isn't super fast. The suspension, the ride quality, the way that it shifts, the way the power is delivered-- naturally-aspirated engines are kind of nice for power delivery because it's just real smooth and it's real predictable. There's no jump from a turbo. There's no turbo lag. It's just there when you need it. And because it's not a super high horsepower car, you get to shift a lot, which is kind of the most fun part about a stick shift car. And it's got a kind of rev match. Toyota calls it IMT-- intelligent manual transmission. It's not like the rev match that you've seen in muscle cars and performance cars where you shift from third to second and it goes like wing, ding, ding, ding, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it's like really dramatic, and you sound like you're, I don't know, at the 24 hours of Daytona. It's a lot more subtle than that. But what it does is it just makes the shift a little bit smoother so you just feel a little bit better at it. And your passengers spill a little less coffee on themselves. If I could change one thing about the way they built this car, I might've gone with the slightly lower gearing. I like a first gear that you can really lug along, and I found that I was barely ever using sixth gear. So they could have had a lower gear, and I don't think they would have given up that much in mileage. I also really like the visibility in this car. The mirror doesn't block anything when you're turning. There's a lot of glass all around you. And the B pillar, which in four-doors sometimes can be like a huge blind spot, isn't. I can see out the window behind me. And it's got blind-spot monitoring, so it'll light up in the mirror if I don't see it. Some of the things I'm talking about in this car are going to apply if you get the CBT automatic transmission. But I don't want you to go and get the CBT and then call me up and be like, Elana, you said this car was super fun, and it's not fun. It'll still be nice. It'll still have a nice interior, and it'll still be a good deal for a daily driver with the automatic. But if you want fun, you've got to get the stick. That's the only way that this car competes with the other fun hatches, like the Mazda 3 or the Veloster. If, for some reason, you're looking at this car and you have no interest in fun, it is still a totally usable car. It's not loud inside. Ride quality is comfortable. You could hate fun and still like this car. It's been a long time since anyone's described the Corolla as a fun car. I'd say maybe late '80s before it went to front-wheel drive? But with the new 6-speed hatchback, it's a real competitor to the Civic SE, the Mazda 3, and the Hyundai Veloster. Go forth and slam some gears, my friends. This Corolla is fun. If you liked this video, please, please, please subscribe. And make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.