The Louisiana oil spill was a terrible thing, but I can’t be alone in thinking Britain suffered for it too. For a start, most of our pensions were invested in BP and plunged along with its share price. George Osborne’s not going to get the billions in taxable BP profits he was banking on. But more annoyingly, the next time you or I go to America we’re going to be blamed for murdering all their pelicans, thanks to Barack Obama constantly calling it British Petroleum.
Well excuse me, but the only reason BP was trying to suck the black stuff out of a fiddly hole 30,000ft beneath the Gulf of Mexico was because the Yanks have used up all the rest of it. And it’s only going to get worse. Obama did have a plan to wean America onto cleaner energy… but they dropped that last month after the vested interests in the Senate went ‘fugeddaboudit’.
The Toyota Auris Hybrid T Spirit’s steering is precise, there’s decent grip and the firm suspension gives you a good feel for the road
Oh well, let them carry on munching their burgers and grits and pretending nothing’s happening. Meanwhile the rest of the world will get on with designing the future. And I do think cars like this are the future.
Big, loud, petrol-powered engines will soon be considered ‘vintage’. People will save them for special occasions and appreciate them more. Everyday driving will mean hybrids. Not pure electric cars – I’ve yet to see a convincing one of those – but hybrids, a young science which is constantly stretching the number of miles you can get out of a thimbleful of petrol.
The conventional-looking steering wheel and driver console
Toyota is pouring billions into this and a lot of the investment is in Britain: the Auris Hybrid is built at Burnaston near Derby and uses a 1.8-litre VVT-i engine made in North Wales. The whole production line is eco-friendly, not just the car. They re-use water, send zero waste to landfill and probably use toilet paper made out of leftover sandwich crusts. So what’s the end result?
Well, one thing’s for sure: anything is better than Toyota’s first hybrid car. I hated the Prius, and still do.
By contrast, I really like the look of this one. It’s basically exactly the same as the normal Auris, apart from some sparkly LED running lights at the front, some blue-backlit dials inside and a smaller boot to make room for the battery pack. The casual observer would never know you’re saving the planet, and that’s the way I like it. There’s none of that stupid Star Trek diagnostic stuff they used to have in hybrids, showing you whether power was flowing into or out of the battery. That dated fast, didn’t it?
The blue-lit minimalist instrumental panel
There are still charge indicators, on simple dials, but to be honest I still wasn’t able to make sense of it. What would make life a lot easier is a little picture of Pingu on an ice cube: put your foot down and a frowning sun would come out and melt said ice cube; get it right and Pingu would be reunited with his sobbing family. While Toyota Auris Hybrid’s gearstick
The tiny gearstick with EV, Eco and Power mode buttons
I’m on the subject of the instruments, the auto gear-stick is tiny – I mean really tiny, like it’s fallen off a kid’s toy – and the three buttons beneath it for EV, ECO and POWER modes strike me as a gimmick. Surely the car should be clever enough to work out that if you’ve got your foot down, you want power and the rest of the time you want to save fuel?
Anyway, they say that in EV mode you can go at up to 30mph without burning a single drop of fuel. How far? Ooh, anything up to 1.2 miles. Brilliant. But I wanted to see the longhaul performance, and set out on a series of motorway drives to see if it really did the 70 miles to the gallon they claim.
Driving this won’t set your undies on fire but the steering’s precise, there’s decent grip and the firm suspension (needed because of the extra weight of the battery pack) gives you a good feel for the road.
The engine’s a bit high-pitched but there’s little road noise and it surprised me how easily it tackled the motorway. I thought I’d be stuck in the slow lane. Mind you, you’re unlikely to test its 112mph top speed as accelerating is a pretty drawn-out affair. It’s really in town where I think these cars are at their best. The Auris is simple to manoeuvre and a godsend to park – although my range- IAN topping model did have the benefit of parking sensors and a rearview camera.
After a week-long test this little car did everything they claim it can do. In fact by my reckoning, it did better. I believe I went well over the claimed 700 miles on one tank. More importantly, it made me happy. It’s cute, easy to use, doesn’t shout about its green-ness and hopefully should keep a lot of Taffs and Midlanders employed for years to come. That’s good enough for me.
The only problem now will be getting our plus-size friends over the water to like it. That’s going to be a very tall order. The last I checked, Obama’s popularity ratings were falling and Sarah Palin’s were going up – that crazy Alaskan woman who probably thinks a hybrid is something that should be chased out of the country with guns. If she’d been in charge when the BP thing happened, Britain would probably be a smouldering nuclear wasteland by now.
But you know what? If the Yanks can blame a disaster at a multi-national oil rig on us, then I’m going to go the other way and claim this Japanese car as a British success story. This proves we’re doing the right thing, and for that we should all go out and buy one.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
