> You don’t buy a Corolla and get mad that you can’t off road with it, do you?
That is not an artificial restriction. If you take it off road, it will perform as car not designed to be taking off road does. It won't refuse to leave the road to protect Toyota's brand.
My FWD Volvo Station wagon would like a word with you
There are (or were) plenty of small cars that did great off road that are no longer sold in the US, if I was looking for a new car and could buy one in the US I'd consider something like the Sizuki IGNIS where it's got 4WD and can hold people comfortably.
I've been asked a few times "what car would you buy?" and my answer is always something along the lines of "if you need to ask, you shouldn't buy a car that I'd buy".
Why don't I own a Toyota? Because they're boring. Boring is actually what most people are looking for in a car.
I need a little excitement in my commute. Maybe something starts spraying. Maybe something starts smoking. Maybe something falls off.
> This makes me a feel a lot better about choosing a Toyota over a Tesla back in 2019.
To anyone not into cars I'll give a simple advice: unless you really do a lot of high-speed highway driving (that'd be 80mph+ / 130km/h+, european highways speed), simply buy a Toyota.
I don't think you can go very wrong buying a Toyota.
And this comes as a german cars lover.
The only reason wife traded her Toyota CH-R for a BMW is because we do lots of (european) highway driving and we felt the CH-R was too noisy on the highway (at 80 mph: at 55 mph it's totally fine).
Buy a Toyota, make sure to do the maintenance needed in official Toyota dealership so you can extended the Toyota warranty for as long as possible.
>All of this is to say that I would trust the domestic manufacturers on anything truck related before I would trust one of the foreign companies, Toyota definitely included.
As someone that has owned lots of foreign and domestic trucks and family has as well, this is a completely absurd thing to say. My Dad’s farm truck Toyota Tundra is past 333k miles on the same engine.
> After just 20K miles, the car honestly felt like a car feels after you put 150K miles on it.
I put over 200k on my 2013 Corolla, and that car still felt new except for a plastic pin that broke the first week on the rear driver quarter panel. I was on a road trip with my wife from Houston to Vegas and heard a flapping while on the highway, I pulled off and saw the panel was loose, I pulled off at the next town, got some super glue from a pharmacy and a stick from the side of the road, and that held solid until I traded it in for $2500 off a Chevy Trax this year (we moved to Upstate NY a few years ago, and we now need the AWD).
But there is also nothing particularly wrong with it. It may not be better, but it has no worse maintenance record, crash record, or accident survival rate then average car. (In software world, that would be perhaps java).
To come with better analogy - PHP is like a 15+ yo car imported from neighbour country because that's the only thing you can afford. Its popular and you'll see it all around in you area, so you may be unaware that better cars even exist. It can be used, but something breaks every 50km, the rust has eaten so much that any minor collision will get you killed, and you'll see people frantically repairing it with duck tape on every street to ever get home. But yeah, you can drive one. And have you heard that next year the tax will be lowered, so you may be able to afford 14 yo cars, life is getting so much better here.
This begs the question, why did you get rid of that?
I bought Toyota Matrix new in 2006, still driving it. From what I can tell, keeping it running is still more environmentally friendly than replacing it with a new car, even if that car is electric/hybrid.
Has no smart anything. Hardly ever breaks. Probably good for another 150k miles, and at this rate it'll be another decade or two by then and all the current car garbage will be worked out or legislated around.
> The Toyota Corolla, their best selling car, is being out-sold in California by Tesla. That wasn't supposed to happen.
I was given a '23 Corolla from a rental agency, and I can say it was a complete disappointment in a way that other random rentals were not.
1) No CarPlay/app integration standard.
2) Horrendous dash geometry and overall interface.
3) Incredibly annoying and non-intuitive lane-keeping alert.
Perhaps Toyota should develop cars that don't suck. Disclaimer: I have owned 4 Toyotas in the past and own an older Toyota currently. I had brand loyalty till about 10 years ago.
I have yet to see a vehicle that isn’t serviceable by an end-user. Sure some require more skill but the average Civic or Corolla isn’t hard to work on at all. If your intention is to work on your own vehicle don’t buy something more complex than your skills will allow.
> This kind of thing is just obviously not allowed in the US, right? I mean, where's the luxury? What happens to all that social status that comes from needing a small ladder to climb into the cockpit of your rigg?
You need to remember just how different the Japanese domestic market is when it comes to roads and vehicles. It's a tiny island nation with low speed limits (37 mph everywhere but divided highways, which are 62mph) and a lot of people. The US is 26 times larger with 1/10th the population density, and lots of high-speed highways.
That is not an artificial restriction. If you take it off road, it will perform as car not designed to be taking off road does. It won't refuse to leave the road to protect Toyota's brand.
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