Anyone have one? I'm looking for a subcompact. I Looked at the Chevy Aveo. Can't belive it (aveo) only gets 34mph hwy, though. What mpg are you getting? Any haggle room or are they still rare on the lots? How do you like it so far? Thanks!
See: Tercel; Echo Basically the same car. What I can't figure is, why they would put a $1600 paint job on an entry-level car?
The Echo has a different engine than the Tercel. It has the variable valve 1.5 VVTI and about 13 more HP. I do believe this is the same engine in the Yaris.
I would assume :) that the Yaris is pretty comparable to the Echo in mpg. I get a pretty consistent 34 in city and the few times I drove it enough on the freeway I calculated 45.
How well does your Yaris ride? Consumer Reports said that the Scion Xa had a choppy ride but that the Echo had a comfortable one, and I was able to confirm this.
I don't have a Yaris, I have a 2000 Echo. My Echo rides great. It's very comfortable for a compact. I mostly use it for commuting, but have driven it on a couple 4 hour Highway trips, and it didn't do too bad, but it's problems aren't so much a comfort issue as it is light and easily blown around by gusts of wind and Large Semi's, so I don't recommend it for anything but occasional Freeway use, but for around town it's been a great little car. I think the Yaris and the Scion both addresed this problem by widening the wheel base and making the car a little lower.
Just purchased a yaris 4 dr. Ride is bit boring. Fine at 70 on the highway. looks good, interior is nice.
one day old. here are my gripes.
automatic is fine but boring. I hate the shift level should have left it with a button to push. speedometer makes it hard to see when you're drive a 5 number 35,45,55
Will have to upgrade the stereo. Not powerful enough. Needs power locks.
Feels like the quality of the car is top notch.
I paid $13,900 for it
At the risk of sounding pedantic... I believe the Echo is a subcompact. Wheelbase refers to the distance between the front and rear wheels. Track refers to the distance between the left and right wheels.
No problem. Thanks for educating me. It's the track they widened on the Yaris . What is the definition of a sub-compact anyways? It's not that much different in size from a Corolla. and definitely bigger than a Geo Metro or Mini cooper, but you're right, they classify the Echo as a sub-compact, although it's just a roomy inside as any compact I've been in.
I like the looks of the 2 dr ,better than the 4 door but I don't think my golf clubs and cart would fit with out a shoe horn.I never drove anything that small and wonder if I could adjust.I wonder about the longevity of the engine I looked under the hood and it is tiny, what kind of major maintance does the owners manual call for, timing belt,tuneups,ect?
Tom
The physical size of the engine does not have any bearing on its longevity, unless you regularly use a small engine to pull huge loads.
You can look up the factory recommended maintenance schedule in the owners section of Toyota's web site.
There are several different ways to determine vehicle class. The U.S. EPA's guidelines are probably the most widely used for marketing purposes, although car rental companies use a different scale. I believe the EPA uses interior volume and body configuration to determine vehicle class, i.e., sub-compact, compact, mid-size, full-size, etc.
Again, I'll talk about the Echo. While I like the looks of the hatch back a lot better, I can easily get 3 sets of clubs in my trunk, probably 4. The trunk is huge. I've looked at the hatchback Scion, and you definitely give up a lot of trunk space, but they do look a lot sportier. As for maintenance and longevity, it is a Toyota engine, so I have confidence in a long life. Now I don't know about the Yaris, but the 1.5 VVTI engine in the Echo uses a timing chain that (supposedly) never needs to be replaced. The most expensive item appears to be changing the spark plugs. Two things that bugged me in the Echo was the use of a plastic intake manifold, and a plastic dip stick, but after 6 years I've not heard of any problems. You can go to toyota.com and pull up the service schedules for any of their cars.
I guess we can expect the death and injury rates to start to climb again, as they did in the seventies when all one could buy was little cars, now that manufactures are offering roller-skate cars again. Why anybody would drive in one of those midget cars just to save a few hundred dollars a year, is hard for me to understand
mike hunt
A tiny engine that need to be run at high RPMs just to stay up to other traffic, can't be a GOOD thing LOL
mike hunt
That's somewhat true. That's why I bought a minivan for the family, and decided not to give my daughter the Echo. I just looked at some statistics and the highest deaths rates are for two door compacts and the lowest are large luxury cars and minivans. SUV and trucks, while doing real well in multiple car crashes suffer from a very high rate of single car crashes, due to roll over and lack of stability. The one exception that stood out was the 4-runner which has one of the lowest death rates of any car and a magnitude lower than most other SUVs. So I guess if you want to be safe, get yourself a big Buick , Lexus or a minivan. If you want your family to be safe, there's not much better choice than a minivan. I'd never put my kids in a SUV that got horrible gas mileage and was prone to roll over accidents. Seems like every time you hear of some horrible accident where a family or group of people were killed, they always seem to be in some big SUV or full sized van that lost control.
Actually NO vehicle is 'prone' to rollover. It was the environuts who put out that fallacy in an effort to get buyers not to buy the SUVs that hated. The Firestone tire problem used mostly on teh Ford Explorer, added to the rollover myth. The fact is only around 2% of ALL accident involve a rollover in the real world. The type of vehicle that rolls over most often, is a car.
If one thinks SUVs are easy to rollover, they have not seen an action movie or TV program, where they often spin but do not roll over. To make a vehicle rollover, any vehicle, the stunt people have to run them up a four or five foot ramp, that is behind something to hide it from the camera. The vast majority of rollover accidents are the result of being struck by, or striking something that causes the vehicle to roll lover. If indeed the one inch higher center of gravity was a cause, one should expect to six wheelers on their side every day ;)
mike hunt
I'll place my bet on an Echo 1.5L with a 4-speed auto or 5-speed manual rather than on a 1970s VW Golf 1.5L with 3-speed auto or 4-speed manual that made it rev at 4,000 RPM on the freeway. Yet I got 170,000 miles from the latter before selling it.
You have to be careful with accident statistics to adjust for driver behavior. Some cars are simply favored much more by careless people (sports cars, SUVs, pickups) and have higher injury and accident rates despite performing very well in crash and handling tests.
Have you been popping oxycontin with Rush Limbaugh?
I live in a flat area, and I've never seen a modern car rolled over on a flat road but just spun out, except for a 280Z that was lifted by hand by a couple of people who were trying to fake an accident. I have seen several pickups and SUVs that were on their side, and if you know anything about older SUVs not made after CONSUMER REPORTS condemned several for easily going out of control, you'd know that most didn't corner well, including the classic military Jeep.
I always thought that the expression "prone to rollover" made it sound as though the thing would just spontaneously turn over while sitting in the driveway.
It's just like leftists to be disingenuous like that. The bastards have been slinking around like curs in the night with their hidden agendas for so long that lying is more instinctive to them than telling the truth is.
Well, you'd expect that. After all, there are more cars on the road than SUVs, right? What's relevant isn't the raw numbers of rollovers of SUVs versus those of cars, but their respective rol- lover _rates_.
"Professional driver, closed course, don't try this at home" &c.
During last winter's rains, I came around a bend in the mountains where I live and saw an Explorer lying on its side in the middle of the road. The winter before, I drove down the mountain one weekend morning and passed a flatbed tow truck with a crumpled SUV on the back that had been rolled (I don't remember what type). That afternoon, onmy way home, I passed another flatbed tow truck, this one with a crumpled Jeep Grand Cherokee on the back.
Now granted, three data points isn't enough to plot much of a curve. On the other hand, all three of these SUV rollover incidents took place on the same curvy, mountain road. In the seven and a half years I've lived in that area, I've only ever seen _one_ rolled passenger car (an Accord, coincidentally on the same morning as the Explorer and several hundred yards farther down the road).
Geoff
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