Retro review: the supercharged Toyota Corolla Compressor

This review was first published in Issue 147 of Top Gear magazine (2005)

How do you extract a partially chewed Jaffa Cake from your left lung? Cough. Hard and repeatedly. Obviously, first you must choke on said orangey confection, and to get enough indignation to swallow it the wrong way you must look at the price of the new Toyota Corolla Compressor. And then look at what you can buy for the same money.

Last time I looked, a Toyota Corolla T-Sport three-door cost £15,995. That was probably last month’s price list, but it’s still reasonable – 189bhp (same engine as the Celica 190 and Lotus Elise 111R) and you could probably knock a grand off that from a dealer. Fairly anonymous, but fast and with a delightfully raucous and peaky, rev-happy engine that gave it a bit of a kick up the bum when you hit about 6,100rpm, right the way round until 8,000 or so. Fine.

But what Toyota has done is strap on a supercharger (and a small one at that), bump up the power by 25bhp-ish and charge £19,995 for the resulting Corolla Compressor. Er. No. I don’t think so. It’s not that it hasn’t done the job. It is absolutely faster. It accelerates through the gears without the dilly-dallying that the powerband-led car was prone to when it was off the boil. It knocks a second and a half off the 0-62mph time, to a respectable 6.9 seconds. It adds a whole 3mph to the top speed. But it’s irredeemably unsatisfying. Like the ‘twin-exhausts’ whose blatantly cosmetic lead-off pipe is given away by the fact you can see the silencer on one side, but not the other.

So the engine has been rendered smooth by the addition of the blower, or at least it has papered over the yawning gap between VVTL-I and not. The suspension is lowered with stiffer springs and there are more skirts and spoilers. It rides adequately, though there’s way too much roll when pitching into a corner for real attack modes. Plus, when you get a lean on, the front 215-section tyres on 17-inch rims give up way too easily, leaving you scrabbling wide on a hiss of vapourising Bridgestone Nero and wailing wasted engine urge.

The final blow comes every time you pull away, because the Compressor boasts the close ratio six-speed manual from the stock T-Sport, with its infuriating first/reverse confusion-combination punch. Go for first gear and the gearstick plops into the reverse gate immediately to the left, which is seemingly stacked in similar cosy proximity as the rest of the gears. The mistake has been realised, because the resulting lorry-like reversing beeper is almost as bad as the one when you leave the keys in the ignition. Beep. Or the lights on. Beep. Or your seatbelt off for a microsecond. Beepity-beep-beep. Or if a tyre slips and the traction control is activated. Beep-Beep-BEEP!

There’s only one thing left to say about the Corolla Compressor; every time you drive it past a Golf GTI you’ll kick yourself so hard you’ll taste shoe leather. Toyota says that it will only import 250 to the UK. All I can think is, thank God.