The Worst, Best Car

It’s relatively easy to name the best car that you’ve ever driven and the worst car.  It’s a little harder to identify the definitive best car of all time and worst car of all time.  But what about the worst, best car?  That is the car that everybody really agrees is quite good for doing what it was meant to do, but also the car that nobody wants to own.  That honor goes to the Toyota Yaris.

 

For clarification, I’m not talking about the Toyota Yaris IA which used to be the Scion IA which is actually a Mazda 2 sedan.  That car is brilliant!  But that conversation is for another day.  I’m talking about the Toyota Yaris hatchback and sedan which has been a Toyota Yaris since 2005.  It competes with the likes of the Honda Fit, Kia Rio, and Ford Fiesta.

 

While the Yaris does compete with those cars, it doesn’t do anything to bring attention to itself while doing so.  Toyota is content to allow the competition to look nicer and pack their cars with more features.  As we all know, the main attraction of the Yaris is its reliability, just as with most Toyotas.  Think of it this way… You know that thing you had to get from the store that happened to be cheaper than the rest of what you could have bought?  You bought it with the knowledge that it wouldn’t work for long, and as soon as it stopped working, you’d have the money to get the more expensive item that you knew would last.  That is the Toyota Yaris in a nutshell.

 

Here’s the problem.  That cheap thing you had bought never broke.  In fact, you’ve had it for ten years now, and it’s still going strong!  It’s even to the point where you’ve definitely gotten your money’s worth, but you are tired of it now and just want a new one.  Again, that’s the Toyota Yaris in a nutshell.  I once heard it said that the Yaris is the cockroach of the car world: nobody ever really wants one, but when they have one, you can’t kill it.

 

Being a subcompact car, it doesn’t have a lot of space to begin with, but couple that with the fairly uncomfortable seats, 109 horsepower engine, and only a 4 speed automatic transmission and you have a car that barely gets by in the real world.  Thankfully, the Yaris is also offered with a 5 speed manual transmission that makes it only marginally better in terms of the engine noise.

 

The Yaris is a car that is completely underwhelming in terms of styling, performance, and comfort.  So what is it good for?  Well, it does one thing really well.  It gets you from one spot to another and back, every single time.  It may not do it well, but you can certainly get by with the four wheels and an engine that Toyota gives you, and believe me, they will both get you really far if you let them.  That being said, the worst best car anybody can buy is the Toyota Yaris.

–SWF