| The Smoking Tire

Posted: 04 Jun 2014 08:29 AM PDT

A couple weeks ago, I got some big news. In the world of young car writers, it was the biggest news.

"You're in the fleet."

That was it. A press car was finally coming my way. It was going to stay with me, and I was going to test it, and I could look down at it from my window as I slept at night, and everything in the world was going to be amazing. People everywhere would stop me as I got out and say, "Wow, are you an auto journalist? I've never seen someone so cool with such a fancy car before. You must be quite the hotshot. Let me buy you a beer!" Sure, I'd test driven a number of new cars at various events, but pretty much anyone can do that. Getting a car all to yourself for the next week? That's what you call an achievement.

Then I read the next line.

"You're getting a…2014 Toyota Corolla."

Um…what? In the world of automotive journalism, the Corolla is rivaled only by the Camry on the list of not cool cars to drive. We make fun of those cars. They don't even offer V8s as an option, and the new one has a CVT. What kind of hair-brained lunacy is that? I write for The Smoking Tire! Part of every car review should involve smoking the tires. Heck, even the Buick LaCrosse that I previously tested could do a burnout. It was disappointingly short, and I don't exactly recommend that you try it, but if you wanted to, you could. A Corolla though? There's no way that would spin its tires.

Once I got over my initial disappointment that I wouldn't be receiving an IS F, I realized that Toyota's choice of vehicle actually made sense. After all, I would be driving it in a convoy headed to Charlotte for the NASCAR All Star Race. The Corolla has always been fairly comfortable and fuel efficient, which are two categories that are important on road trips and two categories in which I'm pretty sure the Corolla will always beat the IS F. Additionally, having gone on many road trips in my fraternity brother's Corolla, a car that we affectionately and somewhat ironically termed the Bro-rolla, you could call me a bit of a Corolla expert.

I don't think you can really get into a review of the new Corolla without first talking about the new look. Corollas have always done their best to be wallflowers when it came to their exterior design, but this new Corolla apparently went home over summer vacation and decided that being completely anonymous was no longer the best way to woo the captain of the football team. It came back with a new look, but how does the new look, well, look?

At first, I would have said it was terrible. It felt like the executives at Toyota looked at the Elantra and thought, "The Elantra is getting all kinds of attention, and it has curves and angles. I guess people like curves and angles and stuff now. Throw some of that on the Corolla when you redesign it." After a week with it though, the look started to grow on me. It's still too shouty for my tastes, and it's not as pretty as the Mazda3, but you start to appreciate it after a little time with it, especially in that blue. I may be partial, but I think blue is almost always a good look.

One of my Corolla-owning friends' biggest complaints about his car is that his interior is plasticky and has pretty easily gotten beaten up. While I can't speak to the long term durability of the materials in the redesigned Corolla, the S model with the technology package actually has a pretty nice, modern interior. It wasn't quite the near-luxury experience that my first drive in the Mazda3 was, but for the nearly eight hours that I spent driving to Charlotte and back, I was comfortable and fairly content.

From the steering wheel to the air vents, most of the materials felt high quality and even upmarket. A big change over the previous system, the Entune system looked modern and did pretty much everything that you would expect from an infotainment system in a new car, providing GPS navigation and XM radio, refusing to read my text messages, and completely frustrating all attempts to use the voice command feature.

The only place that the interior really fell down was the doors, which were covered in lots and lots of black plastic. They felt remarkably cheap in comparison to the rest of the cabin, and while I understand the need to save money in certain places to keep the overall cost down, surely they could do better than that. There was also nowhere sunglasses holder. Why was there no sunglasses holder?

When we get down to the driving experience though, the redesign has sadly (but not entirely unexpectedly) failed to turn the 2014 Corolla into a four door FR-S. It's probably sportier than the previous generation, and the S certainly looks sportier than the base model, but people who want sports cars don't buy Corollas, and people who buy Corollas don't want sports cars. If this were actually a sports sedan, then the lack of driver involvement would be a problem, but when I asked Corolla-owning friends about their cars, none of them mentioned anything about how their car cornered, either good or bad.

When it comes to reviewing how the Corolla drove, performed, and handled, I'm really torn. On the one hand, it fell short in a lot of areas, especially compared to the Mazda3. On the other hand though, is it really fair to criticize a car for not being very good at things that it was never intended to do?

Yes it was slow, yes it understeered, and yes the inclusion of paddle shifters with a CVT was confusing, but can you really get too mad about the lack of steering feel on a car whose owners will almost exclusively use them for running errands and commuting? Overall, it was a comfortable car with a pretty nice interior. It rode well, and it was composed at highway speeds, and even with my very heavy foot, I still averaged nearly 36 mpg for the week.

If you're looking for more, the Corolla was probably never going to be on your list in the first place. There are a lot of drivers out there who are looking for just that though, and for them, the 2014 Corolla S probably hits the nail right on the head.

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