LET'S RUN OR IT'S SURE TO CHASE US DOWN [547]

The Toyota Corolla is the biggest selling car in history, but I had to remind myself of this because, in its twelve generations over the last sixty years the car is, if not boring, then ubiquitous enough to blend into the urban background. I can reliably see three of them within five minutes of leaving the house one early Sunday morning, namely the one which I posted this article, one of which was a taxi. If a police car had passed me, that would likely be a Corolla too. “The car in front is a Toyota” was the company’s advertising tagline in the 1990s, but is more often true now.

I have noticed the wedge shape of the Corolla estate more recently as it has become more seen in the UK as a police car and taxi. The “Police Authority Specification Corolla”, only available as an estate, appeared in 2024 with a 1.8 or 2-litre hybrid petrol engine, and fully kitted out for police use by Toyota themselves, rather than by the police constabulary themselves or an intermediary, which I though had been the case to now.

Special rates are also offered for the Corolla estate, in a “Sports Icon” trim level, through Toyota’s fleet and business portal, which appears to be the source of the prevalent Corolla taxi. I have twice been in the back of these, at either end of trips to and from an airport, and they are perfectly serviceable as a taxi for hire, with enough rear room for four suitcases, although I do not agree that it can sit three people in the back. A “Corolla Commercial” is also sold on Toyota’s website, the back seats of the estate removed to install a flat floor, the remaining rear doors and windows not stopping them from describing it as a van.

The Toyota Corolla appears to be the only estate car still made in Britain, at Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, with engines made in another Toyota factory in North Wales. All Corolla 5-door hatchbacks and estates sold in Europe are made in the UK, and while a slightly smaller Japan-only version of the estate is made and sold there, it is based on the European design. From 2020 to 2025, the estate was branded as a Suzuki Swace, under a five-year licensing deal Suzuki made with Toyota that seems only to have changed the badging, as it was one of my airport taxis – I guess it filled a need for Suzuki at the time.

Estate cars – or station wagons, if you must – are not endangered as a category of car, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) proving the versatility of their form. But the shift towards SUVs by car companies has reduced the availability of “regular” cars that used to form fleets of company cars, taxis and police cars. The Ford Focus and Mondeo have ended production in Europe, the Volkswagen Golf is only sold as a hatchback, but the Vauxhall/Opel Astra continues to hold on, their prices are undercut by other manufacturers, including VW’s own Skoda and Seat, and by Toyota.

I could have easily written this article about Skoda, although their use as a service car is split: the Octavia, similar in size to the Corolla, is also often used as a taxi in the UK, the result of good word of mouth and competitive deals, but the next car up in size, the wonderfully named Skoda Superb, is more often used by the police on motorway patrols, most likely replacing the Volvo V90, another discontinued estate car. Both cars make good use of parent company Volkswagen’s parts bin and service network, which also readies their models for police use, but my guess is that, as the inventors of “just-in-time” manufacturing that saves on storage expenses through having parts ready only at the right moment, Toyota is passing on value in other ways.

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY [460]

from a 1967 Renault brochure

While I have previously written about Citroën’s ingeniously designed 2CV, and their spaceship-like CX, the only Citroën my family has owned was a Xsara MPV, or “people carrier” – remember them? – that licensed the name of Pablo Picasso, presumably to mean something.

However, the only car my family has owned more than once – we had two of them – was also French. Made from 1965 to 1980 in a factory near Le Havre, the Renault 16 was one of the first imported cars to sell in big numbers in the UK, a country that rarely bought from outside its own shores before then – we later benefitted from the second-hand market it opened.

As a child, I remember it being big, roomy and comfortable. The ride was also very smooth, which I now know is due to independent rear suspension using torsion bars that spanned the width of the car, requiring the rear right wheel to be placed slightly forward of the left rear wheel. One of the few front-wheel drive cars on sale in 1965, and with its gearbox placed in front of its aluminium engine, there was no transmission, gearstick or handbrake invading the interior space and separating the front seats. Instead, the handbrake was a pull-out lever under the steering wheel, and the gearstick grew out of the steering column. Oddly, the windscreen washers were activated using a button on the floor, near the clutch.

The 16 was Renault’s biggest and most luxurious car when it went on sale, competing with the Ford Cortina and the Austin/Morris 1800, and made various features available in a family car for the first time, like central locking, powered sunroof and driver windows, and air conditioning. Just as taken for granted in new cars today was the split rear bench seats, with many advertisements for the 16 displaying the sheer amount of luggage it could hold.

This leads to the ultimate innovation of the Renault 16. It was not the first car to have a “hatchback”: Citroën had the “Commerciale” variant of its Traction Avant, and various Austin and Morris cars, included the Mini, had “Countryman” versions that had single or split rear hatches. Even the small Renault 4, the 2CV competitor introduced four years before the 16, had what would be described as a hatchback. 

However, all these cars were usually described as estate cars, or station wagons. The Renault 16, with its rear more raked than squared off, and with a tall profile and large windows, fell between a standard saloon and an estate car. “An entirely new breed of car” was what its brochure said, but only Renault’s American division branded it as the “Sedan-Wagon” during its short time on sale there. I guess as a family, we didn’t think anything of it because most new cars were hatchbacks by the time we had our first 16, the avant-garde having become the standard.

According to www.howmanyleft.co.uk, only eighty Renault 16s remain on British roads as of August 2024. How many cars influenced by it remain? Millions.