Price as tested: €30,595
+ Quality, space, comfort, reliability
– Mushy steering, plain cabin
= Better than most motoring writers will admit
The Toyota Avensis gets a bit of a kicking in the popular press, with the word beige, dull and bland generally being hung around its neck like a bunch of grey garlands. And yet, hundreds, thousands of you go out every year and buy one, making it one of the best selling cars in class and country. Where’s the disconnect? Are motoring journalists just priggish snobs who refuse to like a car unless it can be teased into a tyre smoking drift (probably) or are Irish car buyers just blindfolded sheep who decide they like something and won’t be swerved no matter the evidence presented before them (possibly)?
Actually, the answer is a bit of both plus a major dose of an easy temptation to label cars with simplistic tags. Thus, the Ford Mondeo is the handling champ, the VW Passat is the classy one, the Opel Insigina the pretty one and the Peugeot 508 the French one. Which leaves the Avensis very little other to be than the dull one.
But just as Bill Gates rose from being a maths nerd to Richest Nerd Of Them All, so the Avensis has more than a few talents, which are not exactly hidden but certainly obscured a bit.
So, to hammer home the point, Toyota has just updated the Avensis, with new or at least revised styling inside and out, and for the first time a diesel engine that’s in Band A for tax.
The styling job is actually pretty good. The Avensis was always one of the better and more distinctive looking cars in the class (yes, I just said that) and the facelift makes it look similar to before, but just a touch sharper.
Inside, the work has been less successful. One of the very valid criticisms of the Avensis in its current incarnation has been its interior, which has always looked and felt at least a generation behind the opposition. Old-fashioned dials, coal-black colour schemes and a feeling that, while the actual quality of construction was very good, the touchy-feely stuff had been left out. Things are a little better now. The surfaces are more soft touch and our highly specced test car came with gorgeous and very comfortable biscuit leather-and-suede seats, which lifted the interior ambience no end. The full screen colour sat nav (a snip at €655 as an option) didn’t do any harm either, but seeing as few if any actual bought-and-paid for Avensis’ are going to be specced like this, we’ll reserve judgement on the cabin update until we’ve had a chance to sample one with a more basic spec. The basics of comfort and space are and always have been spot on though.
Behind the beaky new nose likes an updated 2.0-litre 125bhp D4D diesel four cylinder engine which, at last, now qualifies for Band A tax thanks to Co2 emissions of 120g/km. Its claimed consumption of 4.6-litres per 100km should keep you away from the pumps too, but sadly, we could only get it to do low-sixes in fuel economy terms, giving a touring range of just under the magic 1,000km on a full tank.
It’s a reasonably refined engine too, once it’s warmed up and pulls strongly in each of the gears in the sweet-shifting six-speed manual gearbox.
Dynamically, the Avensis has always been a mixed bag and sadly, that hasn’t changed. You get the sensation that there is a really good, sharp chassis in there, trying to get out, but mushy, oddly-weighted steering just leaves you groping in the dark for messages about what’s happening at the contact patch. We know that Toyota can do near-perfect steering; the old Celica and the new GT86 are proof, but the Avensis needs to go to the same finishing school as its coupe sisters.
That should mean that it’s biased towards comfort and by and large, that’s true. But our car (and this may have been down to the specific wheel and tyre combination) exhibited an odd trick of bouncing and bucking when confronted with a bump that affected one side of the car. The rest of the time, the ride felt nicely firm and well damped, but this odd little sensation kept re-occurring. Not sure why. There’s also the issue of arriving at a corner and not being able to accurately judge the correct entry speed and line because the steering is so mushy. That sounds like the complaint of an uber-enthusiast, and it is, but the fact is that the Avensis’ competitors do it better and it’s a shame that the essentially sure-footed chassis has lost its main line of communication to the driver.
Still, there is excellent quality to be had here. For a basic €24,495, you get aircon, remote stereo controls, an electronic parking brake, lots of safety gizmos including active anti-whiplash headrests and a drivers’ knee bag (the Avensis has one of the highest-ever safety ratings from EuroNCAP), daytime running lights, iPod connectivity and more. And at last, Toyota has ditched the cheap-looking old fixed ignition key and given us a proper modern folding one. In fact, our test Luna spec car actually had a nice keyless entry and ignition system.
So, while things aren’t perfect, there is still much to admire about the updated Avensis. It’s still spacious, comfortable and quiet, still looks good (especially the very handsome estate version) and of course still has that benchmark Toyota quality and reliability. If only they’d let the chassis guys who did the GT86 get their hands on it for a day or two, we might have an out and out class champ. Until then, it’s better than most of us car critics allow it to be, but just not as good as we know it could be.
Facts & Figures
Toyota Avensis 2.0 D4D 125 Luna Saloon
Price: €30,595
Range price: €24,995 to €38,165
Capacity: 1,998cc
Power: 124bhp
Torque: 310Nm
Top speed: n/a
0-100kmh: 9.7sec
Economy: 4.6l-100km (61.4mpg)
CO2 emissions: 120g/km
Tax Band: A. €160 road tax
Euro NCAP rating: 5-star: 90% adult, 86% child, 53% pedestrian, 86% safety assist
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