KEY POINTS:
Here is the almost-cubic car. It seems to be nearly as tall and wide as it is long, like a blown-up Smart.
Unlike the tiny car with the rear engine, though, Toyota's new iQ is a four-seater. Well, a three-and-a-half seater, anyway.
It's extremely short: under three metres long.
Partly this is because it has no meaningful boot and rear passengers' heads are mere inches away from the back window.
Fill the iQ with people and you'll barely squeeze a MacBook Air in behind them.
The driveshafts are placed not behind the engine and gearbox, as is usual, but in front of them. At a stroke, this pushes the front wheels forward while creating impact-accommodating space in front of the engine, so there's none of the nose-heavy overhang that blights too many new cars.
It's surely the future, and we'll see more Toyota cars designed this way.
Is the iQ, then, the car we didn't know we needed? The idea looked amazing when revealed as a concept car at last year's Frankfurt motor show.
But Toyota lost its nerve a little as concept morphed into reality.
The final car has neat one-piece side windows which lack the fussy rear quarterlights of the concept. So that's good. But the concept's fun-looking triangular headlights and tail-lights have gone, replaced by larger, heavier-handed units laced with chrome.
Why? "Because it looks more upmarket," says chief engineer Hiroki Nakajima. Goodbye to class-transcending minimalism, then. This is reflected in the price, which is expected to start at around 9000 pounds ($23,950).
Open a door and you get a bit of a shock. Let's put it this way: the iQs I drove were very early examples, so I thought they had been assembled using whatever trim parts were ready.
But no: it's meant to have linearly grained brown trim on the doors to complement a dark grey dashboard, and its seats are meant to have different patterns on cushion and backrest.
There's a fine line between what might be called "funkiness" and a visual mishmash, and the iQ is on the wrong side.
Why the brown, seemingly borrowed from another iQ with a notional brown dashboard? "Nowadays it's a sophisticated, upmarket colour," says Mr Nakajima.
That apart, the cabin is almost very clever. The dashboard and footwell are scooped right out ahead of the front passenger, so you can slide the seat well forward and still have enough legroom. This liberates enough space behind to accommodate an adult, but you'd need to be a child to squeeze behind the driver.
Alternatively you can fold down that half of the back seat, or all of it, and create a load space. A remarkable 12 airbags are secreted around the cabin, including rear ones and one in the front passenger seat cushion to help compensate for the seat's distance from the dashboard.
And to drive? The iQ stays flat and firm as it takes a corner, and it feels stable at speed.
Yet the combination of its shortness and plenty of space in the frontal structure around the wheels, allowing the wheels to turn through a large angle, gives a magically tight turning circle.
This and the square-cut shape make it very easy to park. So the iQ is ultra-agile, yet it stays more comfortable than you might expect over bumps and undulations.
A sharp-edged road fault will cause a thump or a bang, but on the whole the tiny Toyota is surprisingly quiet and civilised. And, being light (845kg in basic form), it's lively.
The UK won't get the 1.4-litre diesel version but a 1.3-litre petrol iQ is planned for late next year. Both engines sound far too big for such a compact car, though; the regular 996cc, three-cylinder unit is much more appropriate. It manages 68bhp and the manual transmission produces just 99g/km CO2. The CVT automatic is a bit thirstier at 110g/km.
The engine makes that deep, melodious hum typical of three cylinders, and propels the iQ keenly if not particularly swiftly. There's enough instant urge to squirt it through traffic when needed.
As for the "gearless" CVT automatic, it takes the edge off the pace but is very easy to use.
You have D for Drive, with an economy light to encourage light-footed driving, S for Sport in which the engine revs up more freely, and B for Braking which you use when descending a steep hill, the transmission then being locked in a low ratio.
Will the iQ make it? The concept is great, but the decoration shows woolly thinking and Toyota's marketeers need to think about some daring accessorisation. Done right, it could turn the iQ into quite a phenomenon.
- THE INDEPENDENT
