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It's easy to forget just how big a role Toyota's Corolla has played in our lives and on our roads. But when Toyota lined up 10 generations of Corolla at the latest version's launch, the stories popped from the woodwork thick and fast.
This person's owned three; that
one even more. Stories of misspent youth, of formative years, of early TV advertising were aired.
That's when I realised the tag "world's best-selling nameplate" really does mean something.
About 32 million Corollas have sold worldwide since its 1967 launch, 198,000 of them in New Zealand. The model's 40-year history is inextricably linked with that of Toyota New Zealand, also celebrating its 40th, and with the Kiwi psyche.
But it's important to TNZ for more than historical reasons. With a lead in the first quarter, Toyota is poised to overtake GM as the world's number one carmaker.
And Corolla is its best bet of topping the nameplate chart in New Zealand, as it did in 1988 when Corollas had a 79 per cent share of Toyota's car sales and a 13.8 per cent share of our total market.
To do that now it will have to knock the iconic Commodore off its perch. And with the rise and rise of the Koreans and their rapidly improving quality, it can no longer do that via its traditional means, providing a quality product in a mainstream guise and charging premium for it.
So does the new Corolla deliver? Strike one to TNZ, for alongside Australia it fought for the right to retain the Corolla name. The hatch is now tagged Auris in most markets, only the more conservative sedan clinging to its old tag.
And it really is more conservative. The Japan-designed four-door skin is smart enough but the interior is regrettably dull.
That's more disappointing given the European-penned hatch's funky design. The exterior's smart and deceptive, for Tardis-like this car feels far roomier inside than it looks from outside.
The interior is the piece de resistance - modern and quirky without proving difficult to use. That sloping central fascia offers excellent ergonomics, its thrusting arch a visual extravagance in such a bread-and-butter car.
Beneath it there's an almost hidden cubby hole for wallets and cellphones handily placed by a power socket. In fact there are cubbies everywhere.
So Corolla's reputation for smart-and-useful is almost unsullied. Shame the handbrake lever has been positioned more with design in mind - the more you pull it on the less convenient an angle it presents.
But never mind the details, what about the bigger picture?
This hatch is 30cm longer than a 1988 Corolla, a whole 69cm longer than the 1967 original. It offers a cubic metre of additional interior space on that first car, weighs almost twice as much and takes 37 weeks of your average pay packet to acquire, against 60 weeks in 1967.
That smaller wedge buys an all-new car from the ground up. The clean sheet allowed the designers not only to provide more cabin space but carefully tailored cabin space. This Corolla is 45mm higher, for example but only 5mm goes into head room. The rest raises your hip point by 40mm to ease entry and egress.
There's an all-new engine too, a 1.8-litre four-cylinder in-line unit with variable valve timing that produces 100kW and 175Nm, and is mated to either a six-speed manual or four-speed auto.
It pulls strongly enough, and though it sounds thrashy at high revs it's smooth and responsive at cruising speeds and even higher.
The electrically-assisted steering offers good feel at the steering wheel, and the suspension's fairly conventional set-up does a decent enough job of controlling this car.
Its ride is comfy, if not over-soft, and certainly cushioned the bigger bumps of the lumpy Manawatu roads traversed at launch, though it was less efficient over smaller jiggles.
Where it excels is in the standard features. Even the base GX gets four airbags - the GLX has seven, including a knee airbag, quite possibly a first for this class.
The GX can be optioned up for $500, and given that the seven-bag car scored a five-star NCAP crash test rating (plus four out of five, and three out of four, for child and pedestrian protection respectively), those added bags might prove cheap insurance.
I've left the orphan out of the picture. The Japanese-designed wagon is strictly speaking not an export model and will rarely be seen outside Japan. Here it's expected to appeal to fleets, though its keen price may snare the occasional private buyer. Its smaller engine and a reduced features list let Toyota pin the price back to $25,900, an eyebrow-raising $6300 drop from the outgoing version.
Which Corolla will sell best? Undoubtedly the hatch. It's better-looking, better-designed, and more versatile in terms of daily use.
And Toyota has at last sharpened its pencil, with prices starting from to $30,500 and topping out at $36,990 for the top-spec car.
The sedan might not suffer the hatch's wind flutter at speed and it costs the same, but it's unimaginative to look at and less convenient to use. Where are the clever pop-out cupholders and handy cubbies, for starters?
Corolla's arrival prompts as many questions as it answers. Will this car's build quality match up to its predecessors? Will anyone buy the boring sedan? Will we get a diesel Corolla? Probably. TNZ hopes to make an announcement soon likely to confirm the arrival of the 1.4-litre turbo-diesel.
Meanwhile it's already announced the arrival of satellite navigation to its range, and predicted that with fuel prices remaining high, this Corolla will soon outsell the Commodore.
