2007 Toyota Yaris Review

Specifications

Our apologies go out to those of you following the long term update forour Yaris Sedan, as it’s been quite some time since our last update. Let’s see, there’s been Christmas, New Year’s and most recently, the Detroit Auto Show, not to mention a couple of high-mileage trips that were done in airplanes. Add that all up, and you can already begin to see how busy things have been getting for us. The good news is that our Yaris has been on the road through all of this, and it’s performed admirably. The Yaris found itself in the hands of our staff, particularly during shopping season, as it’s nimble enough to fight its way through traffic, and otherwise agreeable after receiving the credit card bills from the holidays due to a slim thirst for fuel.

Now that January is two-thirds over, and memories of New Year’s celebrations and lazing around on Sunday afternoon with family and friends are long gone, it’s back to the reality of early mornings and long hours of office work – and for some of us, school.

Along with the office and classroom, another thing has returned; the buzzing noise behind the dashboard hasmade a reappearance, and it’s on a daily basis now that the weather’s become cold. The harmonics, which seem to come from right behind the dashboard and around the instrument cluster only happen after the car’s been sitting for quite some time, like overnight. It mostly goes away, though, but sometimes it makes its presence known while steadily cruising on the highway. That makes the source of the sound that much more difficult to diagnose, without leaving the car in the hands of someone else for an extended period of time, something that we’re not so inclined to do given that it’s an essential part of our fleet.

Now we turn to the jam-packed pages of the logbook. We’ve taken the liberty of filtering out a good chunk of the dialogue given the number of entries made over this extended time period, ensuring that you, our readers, only get to see the stuff worth reading:

Odometer: 1,912 miles

Hannah: Jon and I went to a Christmas party last night and we had to loada bunch of presents. Surprisingly enough, the trunk is pretty huge even with Justin’s dare I say, junk (?!?) in it. We had to also pick up a couple of friends on the way and they brought presents of their own. Did I say the trunk is pretty huge already?

The car, thankfully, has four doors unlike our last car, so I didn’t have to get out to let them in (apparently that is some unwritten driver’s rule if the car has two doors - I still don’t like that idea unless I’m driving). By the way, it’s the only feature I can really say I like with this car. I just find this one average looking, which in my book is actually not bad in comparison to the other cars Jon brings home. I know - and no, I’m not going to print them cause that’s not fair. Anyhow, my friends find the back seat spacious, which is a lot to say given the size of this car. If you ask me, I’m not trying to be mean but they’re kinda small.

We got stuck in traffic on the way, which only got me angrier as a.) the car’s whining revs when Jon punches the accelerator are annoying, b.) we were running late, and c.) Jon was so annoyingly relaxed about the whole thing!