2021 Toyota Corolla Ascent Sport Hybrid review

Fifty million examples sold globally, over half a century on local terra firma and the most popular passenger car in Oz. Despite what little introduction is required for the Corolla nameplate, the price-busting Ascent Sport Hybrid Hatch version – the cheapest petrol-electric offering in Toyota’s stable – deserves a thorough dissection.

Toyota's exponential growth of hybrid popularity – it recently clocked over 200,000 sales locally – makes this entry hatchback iteration crucially important, given Corolla sits, historically, as the marque’s third most-popular petrol-electric choice behind the Camry and RAV4.

Why might you be drawn to the thrifty hybrid five-door? As ‘my first hatch’. As a fuel-miser runabout. As a cheap-to-buy-and-run daily driver. As a thrifty ride-sharing, pizza-delivering ally. Or as a fleet special even though Toyota continues to nudge its popular small car more towards private buyers.

Toyota dropped the old ‘base’ configuration in the twelfth-generation Corolla’s recent introduction, and while the Ascent Sport Hybrid Hatch might appear to be positioned further upstream its true mettle inevitably rings truer in what goodness it offers, not just in equipment but in the everyday experience.

Let’s see how it fares.

RELATED READING

Looking for more details on the wider Corolla range? Our full range review has everything you need to know.

Pricing and Features

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At $27,395 before on-roads, the Ascent Sport Hybrid commands a two-grand premium over the petrol automatic version in either hatchback or sedan guises. This undercuts the smaller Yaris hybrid by $1735 (list) given the smaller Toyota enters the petrol-electric fray at middling SX grade.

Unsurprisingly, the base Corolla’s equipment suite runs lean in some areas though it does offer quality gear, some of which is feel-good stuff that drags the Ascent Sport out of the poverty pack doldrums, others more worthy, particularly in terms of safety to augment those ‘my first car’ credentials.

The hatch version fits 16-inch alloy wheels, bi-LED headlights with auto high-beam, LED DRLs and taillights, heated and power-retractable mirrors, a guided reversing camera, electronic park brake, remote entry and adaptive cruise control. No slumming it here, perhaps short of the conspicuously absent rear parking sensors.

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The cabin fits seven airbags, a 4.2-inch colour driver’s screen with digital speedo and dual-zone climate control rather than manual air-con. Nice. Infotainment is a reasonably large 8.0-inch touchscreen format offering Apple CarPlay and Android Auto mirroring, though its slim feature set means you have to pay an extra $1000 for sat-nav and DAB+, which are bundled into an options package that also includes rear privacy glass. On that, premium paint wants for an extra $595.

The five-door was awarded a five-star ANCAP rating dated 2018, with the base version fitting a rudimentary Safety Sense suite that includes all-speed autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian and daytime cyclist detection, lane departure warning, lane-tracing steering assistance, road sign assist and audible ‘danger zone’ warnings.

Walking up to the Corolla SX Hybrid adds a further $3400 to the list price ($30,795 + ORC) and adds key safety inclusions such as blind-spot monitoring, rear cross-traffic alert and parking support brake – ostensibly reversing AEB – plus front and rear parking sensors.

Comfort and Space

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You’ll really want to like, or at least tolerate, grey plastic. The Ascent Sport cabin drowns in it.

The absence of colour and limited garnish helps make the entry hatch broadly palatable and largely inoffensive. Like the hardy cloth trim and absence of electric seat adjustment, it’s not out of place in the humble space this Ascent Sport occupies. It’s just quite joyless, the sweet relief of colour and interest brought by the driver’s display and infotainment screen a distraction from the cheap-looking – and feeling – surfaces that, with cursory inspection, appear a little slapped together in areas.

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The core design is pleasing enough, its shapely and contemporary dash pleasingly minimalist and its controls and features easy to read and intuitive enough to negotiate. Cost-cutting hasn’t robbed a certain sporting essence, from seat positioning to ergonomics that seep through the twelfth-gen Corolla’s basic DNA. And yet the vinyl steering wheel rim, sole USB port, hard-surfaced cubbies that rattle your personal effects and the absence of any second-row creature comforts are regularly reminders that you’ve bought on a relative budget.

The Corolla hatch interior is, though, reasonably well packaged, properly comfortable and natural – at least for front occupants – as well as quite resolved in format. Nothing too weird, more or less everything in its appropriate place. The lack of real character is compensated for with basic, easy-to-use clarity.

Cost-cutting hasn’t robbed a certain sporting essence, from seat positioning to ergonomics that seep through the twelfth-gen Corolla’s basic DNA.

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The infotainment system, though, leaves much to be desired, sprouting proudly from the dash top and its thick frame housing shortcut buttons that are handy only once you’re familiar with the layout because the labelling is so dim.

Its content is slow, clunky, arduous to navigate and there’s precious little of it outside of our test car’s optional sat-nav, which looks to be graphically and functionally dragged into service begrudgingly from some era of yore. Even the large-view reversing camera, which is terribly grainy, adds a passé vibe and conspires to a dated ambience at odds with the Corolla’s contemporary pitch, particularly with its exterior styling.

In fact, the Japanese five-door’s stylised form has claimed a large scalp in the form of boot space. At just 217 litres, it’s paltry against segment competitors, albeit no smaller in volume than the petrol version (which features a larger 50-litre fuel tank against the hybrid’s 43L) and offering a space-saver spare housed in a cradle that looks large enough to accommodate a full-sized wheel.

On the Road

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The Corolla’s hybrid powertrain is a curious if well-worn cocktail adopted in various global Toyota models, combining the 2ZR-FXE 1.8-litre naturally aspirated Atkinson cycle petrol four producing 72kW and 142Nm, paired with an electric motor good for 53kW and 163Nm. Toyota generally advertises the internal combustion outputs on official literature, though total system power is said to be 90kW.

Marrying the two power units is a clever e-CVT, a dual-input planetary gear design – one quite different to the widely adopted belt-drive/conical-pulley CVT set-up – providing series or parallel drive plus direct electric drive when demanded. It’s familiar in functionality to the great many Toyota and Lexus hybrid owners and users, if no less tricky because of it.

Some of the old patchy drivability and notchy transition between power units seem to have been ironed out in the Corolla’s application, its e-motor torque immediate in response as ever, a little lustier than I remember of older petrol-electric designs, with petrol power seemingly less strained when called to even moderate action. It’s a nicer, if mildly evolved synergy, politer in action and less transitional across the broad scope of driving inputs and road speeds.

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Toyota’s closed-circuit, nickel-metal hydride-based systems have long plied their most rewarding efficiency dividends around town, at low speed or in stop-start driving, rarely returning much love on the open road. But this Ascent Sport is the first of its ilk where I’ve noticed a tendency to drop into EV mode quite so regularly flat running on a light throttle at motorway speeds.

Does it make a difference? In terms of refinement and comfort, yes – even if the base hatch is prone to drumming up enough tyre noise to send you diving for the stereo volume knob. In the proper guts of city driving, it returned an impressive 4.4L/100km against its combined 4.2L claim. Bravo. But I was somewhat surprised that out on the open road, it almost stubbornly refused to dip north of the threes.

I’d long pegged Toyota’s hybrids efficiency as quite conditional and situational. This Corolla, though, demonstrates frugality with an impressively broad, real-world approach that I don’t recall its forebears offered quite so confidently.

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There are attempts to overcomplicate matters. You can toggle between Eco and Sport drive modes, the only meaningful return being a bit more noise without much extra bite. Then there’s the dedicated EV mode, which simply deactivates and fire the engine into service the instant road speed creeps above 40km/h… pretty much exactly like its default hybrid mode does anyway.

Where this generation really, conspicuously upped Corolla’s game was in the ride and handling balance afforded by its TNGA platform, leveraging a deftly tuned suspension calibration. And that goodness that was quite the revelation on my first introduction to this twelfth-gen Corolla runs deep in the base version, its 16-inch rolling stock not doing styling many favours but bringing an extra sheen of sidewall compliance compared with the 18s fitted further up the range.

The ride is good, not perfect. It gets caught jolting a little on sharp-edged road imperfections and there’s some faint suspension noise but on balance, as a buck-banging runabout, the general on-road comfort punches above its weight.

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Handling is fine enough; cooperative, reasonably light on its rubber feet, direct enough in pointing in the desired direction and generally task free. In fact, it’s quite a decent machine to spend long stints in the saddle, which bodes well in the faithful service of delivering paying passengers or hot food. If there’s much of a gripe it’s braking, the Corolla’s electro-regen protocols, directly or by association, bringing with them a slightly unnatural and granular feel to the left pedal.

It’s quite a decent machine to spend long stints in the saddle, which bodes well in the faithful service of delivering paying passengers or hot food.

Ownership

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Toyota’s five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty is industry-standard fare these days but it’s the servicing and support from the brand’s huge dealer network that are big drawcards. The Corolla’s capped-pricing program currently wants for $205 per visit across the first five years of ownership, with intervals of 12 months or 15,000km.

Add in that the hybrid’s frugality is 91 RON friendly and it makes for some properly cheap running.

Verdict

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Toyota, its local arm, brand loyalists and gearheads alike might cringe at the ‘appliance’ reference when describing a Corolla. But at ground level for the world’s most popular passenger car, in a guise focused on wallet-friendly running, it certainly fits the bill perfectly.

As it turns out, the Ascent Sport Hybrid Hatch is an ideal appliance and then some. Very much to a strength.

Its rudimentary nature and trim frills rob very little from what’s a solid and likeable, safe-as-houses proposition. It’s quite a fine thing to drive and, importantly, its efficiency chops are much more than mere lip service. That it doesn’t wear its eco sensibilities on its sleeves and, given you don’t need to plug it in, requires low effort for its economy returns.

Llittle wonder, then, that Toyota’s particular approach to green-tinged motoring is so popular and widely accepted.

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Its rudimentary nature and trim frills rob very little from what’s a solid and likeable, safe-as-houses proposition.

Toyota’s small five-door is, though, a little compromised for packaging and outright practicality. And at over $32K for our tester’s configuration parked up in your driveaway, the price is getting up there.

Further, the entry variant’s relatively basic active safety fit-out makes the more elaborately furnished mid-range SX appear the better option for young and inexperienced drivers. The petrol SX is only marginally pricier than the base hybrid if you’re willing to forego petrol-electric motivation.

RELATED READING

Looking for more details on the wider Corolla range? Our full range review has everything you need to know.