Not A Thriller
by David Finlay (23 Jul 08)

It's a little difficult to know what to expect here. Almost everyone who has ever test driven a Toyota Auris reckons that it is a boring car, and having driven a 1.6 petrol version for six months and a 1.4 diesel for a week I can confirm that this is indeed the case. And nothing wrong with that. The world needs boring cars. They are the backbone of the industry, and Toyota's ability to produce very fine boring cars is they key to its success.

But if you look at the specification of the Auris SR180 tested here, you might be led to assume that it would at the very least be taking cautious steps around the fringe of interestingness. It has a 2.2-litre turbo diesel which produces an entirely interesting 177bhp. It has sports suspension and alloy wheels and tinted rear glass. It even has a rear spoiler. Compared with regular Auris models, which tend to fade into the background even when you're looking straight at them, it looks rather good.

As the power figure would suggest, it's quite quick. It will do 130mph flat out and it can accelerate from rest to 62mph in 8.1 seconds. If you don't push it too hard you should get over 40 miles to a gallon (the official combined figure is 45.6mpg) and you pay road tax on the basis of 164g/km of CO2 emissions, which means you'll be paying well under £200 in annual VED for the foreseeable future.

While this is all undeniably good news, it doesn't alter the fact that the SR180 is hardly more fascinating than any other Auris. It goes pretty quickly when you ask it to, but you'll rarely be inspired to make the request because it never feels particularly sporty (there's enough front-end body movement to make hard cornering a bit of a chore, though there's no doubt that it grips the tarmac well enough).

Why should this be, when Toyota has fitted sports suspension? Well, the main effect of the chassis tweaking is to counteract the extra weight of the diesel engine. The match is so accurate that I can't help thinking Toyota deliberately arranged things so that the SR180 would handle in exactly the same way as the 1.6 petrol. Which would be odd.

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