Toyota Corolla Cross

While the exterior design of the Toyota Corolla Cross shares almost nothing with the Corolla sedan, the interior cabin has been lifted off completely from the latter. This means that the slightly minimalist theme for the dashboard layout of the Toyota Corolla Cross makes it look quite plain from the inside.

The Toyota Corolla Cross gets a simple looking three spoke multi-functional steering wheel, but the full TFT instrument console behind it looks pretty interesting with all the colored details. At the center of the dashboard, the free-mounted rectangular touchscreen infotainment system is placed just in the middle with symmetrically designed slim panel of the automatic climate control just below it.

The rest of the dashboard looks pretty simple with a wide layout for the central transmission tunnel flowing from the bottom of the center console. The Toyota Corolla Cross is decently loaded with premium equipment like dual zone automatic climate control, push button start with keyless entry, leather upholstery and powered driver’s seat.

Compared to the Toyota Corolla sedan which looks quite sleek, Toyota has designed the Corolla Cross from scratch, which in comparison, looks quite bold and very SUV like.

The Toyota Corolla Cross has a macho looking front end, which has sleek looking all-LED headlamps which do become curvy as they move outwards, thus making them look like curved wings of a feather. The trapezoidal grille with slightly curved side edges is given an all-black treatment with honeycomb inserts and silver garnish on the surrounds, which makes it look very bold when viewed head-on. The wide looking body cladding with fog lamps placed just below the edges of the front grille do complete the frontal look of the vehicle.

From the side, the Toyota Corolla Cross has got a unique stance, the major highlights of which are the boomerang-shaped character lines above the wheel arches, which blend nicely with the contours of the front bonnet and rear windscreen. Talking about the wheel arches, they are slightly squared out here and do get body cladding above them, which merge well with the side cladding below the doors. 

At the back, the Toyota Corolla Cross looks quite sober as compared to the front and rear, as it gets sleek and wide tail lamps with inverted-L shaped LED inserts on the inside of them. The trapezoidal housing for the license plate with wide ‘Corolla Cross’ lettering in the middle does make it look bold too. Like the front, the rear bumper too gets thick body cladding and body-coloured skid plate in the middle.

The Toyota Corolla Cross is based on the same platform and gets the same suspension setup as the Corolla sedan – Macpherson struts at the front and torsion beam at the rear. However, the suspension is tuned on a slightly stiffer edge, to make it more in line with its crossover roots in its overall behavior. 

The lower G variant of the Toyota Corolla Cross gets the same 1.8-litre four-cylinder naturally aspirated petrol engine from the Corolla sedan, which makes 140 PS of power and 172 Nm of torque. The more premium V variant gets a hybrid powertrain, where the same 1.8-litre petrol engine is coupled with a battery and motor setup, and make up a maximum power and torque outputs of 98 PS and 142 Nm. In both the variants, one gets a CVT gearbox as standard.

The Toyota Corolla Cross gets an adequately long list of safety features, such as front, side, curtain and knee airbags, ABS with EBD and brake assist, pre-collision warning, lane tracing assist, lane departure alert, adaptive cruise control, automatic high beam, blind-spot monitor, rear cross-traffic alert, vehicle stability control, hill start assist, front and rear parking sensors and reverse camera.

The Toyota Corolla Cross gets a more practical and go-everywhere approach over the Corolla sedan, with its increased ride height, butch design and more robust underpinnings. While it sacrifices a bit on ride quality as compared to the sedan version, it surely has got more character overall.