Toyota Yaris 2015

Next time you visit a big supermarket or department store, take a look on how its sectors are decorated. The beverage zone usually features wooden shelves and dim light, so as to resemble French bistros, vegetables are surrounded by straw and grass to remind of a farm, the electronics part looks futuristic, and so forth. The truth is you can’t sell too many products in one single way, simply because they are too different for that. This article’s car helps to prove that you can apply that rule to pretty much any kind of company and extract great results.

Despite it gave incredible boosts to some automakers, the concept of design language resulted much harder for others to accept because you need to discover to what limits it’s convenient to be applied. This comes from the fact that each car of the same company is designed to (theoretically) attract a different buyer, like hatchbacks for young drivers, sedans for older couples and minivans for large families. So making them all look the same would basically go against the initial goals. This is why big companies like Ford and Nissan decided to work with not one, but multiple languages: the first divides in trucks and cars, while the other does it by categories. But if you still got interested in creating an army of exactly-alike cars, Volkswagen has already beat you to it.

Yaris’s refresh for 2015 is interesting because it’ll help the all-new Aygo to establish Toyota’s new design rules for hatchbacks – Etios Cross and the Asian Yaris have done something similar, too. While Vios, Corolla, Camry and Avalon invest on design cues focused on classic elegance, Yaris shows a new interpretation of the X-shaped front fascia debuted at the younger brother. Using rounded elements and chrome inserts and hiding the daytime LEDs in the headlights makes it a little fancier, but still carrying a lot of that strong character. Since this is only a midlife facelift, the sides only received new alloy wheels, while the rear features new bumper and new internal design with more LEDs for the tail lights.

Toyota’s intention is to make its vehicles look less rational, although keeping the characteristics that managed to build that reputation. Applying that to Yaris resulted on a redesigned cabin with a whole new offer of equipments and colors, along with substantial improvements on material appearance and quality and on “driving pleasure and onboard comfort”, to quote the company. This is also a very important product for Toyota Europe because it was entirely projected there. And since Yaris has been a great seller since it was launched there, two generations and fifteen years ago, it’s an important proof that the company was actually able to satisfy the customers of a foreign market without dropping its original characteristics.

When it comes to the “invisible” parts, such as structure and powertrain, the news are restricted to the first ones. The automaker has invested on reducing noise, vibration and harshness, while the suspension got improvements on handling and comfort. The second aspect was pretty much carried over from the outgoing Yaris, which means there will be four engines: the three-cylinder gasoline 1.3L can reach 95 g/km of CO₂ emissions when equipped with start/stop, the gasoline 1.3L and the diesel 1.4L got smaller updates, and the hybrid variation now complies with Euro 6 and had some adjustments to reach 75 g/km and 30.3-kpl of gasoline. The latter is particularly important because it accounts for one third of Yaris’ sales and part of the 34% sales growth in the last year.