Toyota Avensis Tourer

The Toyota Avensis is a hard car to pigeon hole.  It neither sits amongst the prestige estates with the Germans, but then it doesn’t feel like it should be placed alongside the run of the mill load carriers from Ford or Vauxhall.

Truth is, if this car wore Lexus badges you’d be fooled.  It oozes style and sophistication and on higher spec models it doesn’t lack gadgets and features.  This TR model, one up from bottom, doesn’t spoil us quite so much, but it still has a quality feel to it.

But the Avensis 2.0 D4D TR Tourer does have two things really going for it — the luggage space and low running costs.  At 1,609 litres with the seats down (543 with them up) it can take a lot of kit, be that family related paraphernalia or work samples.  And the four cylinder 2.0 litre diesel engine is rated at just 140g/km of CO2 and achieves 52.3mpg on the combined cycle; both great figures.

The seats fold a little oddly though, not really folding completely flat or using the base as an effective bulkhead.  Neither of these things need matter unless you are carrying heavy, bulky items though.  And this is no sports tourer, let’s be clear.  With just 124bhp on tap it needs 10 seconds to do the 0-62mph benchmark on the way to 124mph.  It handles OK, but no better than it needs to.

But it will cruise happily enough although we started to get a bit uncomfortable in the drivers seat after a long journey.  But for the money could you really expect it to do everything brilliantly?  No question it’s better looking than the Avensis saloon on which it is based; it will prove cheap to run; and you feel like you’re somewhere special when you’re sat inside.  And it will carry five people in relative comfort with bags and added assortments.

For many, that’s all the important boxes ticked.


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