Formula for success

Two weeks ago, Toyota was kind enough to deliver an Altis to my house for a week-long test drive. Regular readers of this section will know that one of the nice things about the Motoring beat is the chance to drive cars we wouldn’t normally be able to afford. Like a BMW 530d. Or a Mercedes-Benz B170. Or even a Chevy Spark… wait, I think I can still put the down on that one. Anyway, the point is that test drive after test drive can inure even the most rabid enthusiast to the particular charms of a given car, so much so that when we have nothing else to do, when we’ve exhausted all possible topics about a particular car or niche, we’ll happily move on to the juicier topics of this business, which generates its fair share of tsismis.

So there the Altis 1.8G arrived at my doorstep at 10 in the evening, Toyota’s assigned driver/gopher cheerfully handing me the keys despite what had been obviously an exhausting day (and night) of pulling out cars and transferring them to different people all over Metro Manila. Since my house is a long walk from the entrance to my subdivision, I gave the guy a lift to the corner. Got in, adjusted the seat and steering wheel like so, put the shifter in Drive, went off, and deposited the driver at the village gate — a routine I could do with my eyes closed, since cars these days are absolutely idiot-proof to get familiar with. Unless the car is from Europe, of course, because most European cars tend to have fussy cockpits. I got back to my house and promptly went to bed. The next day, I went to work. The day after that, I went to work again. And again.

Over the long weekend, I used the car to go to the gym and do some personal errands. On the last night of the long weekend, my family piled in for dinner at Paseo de Santa Rosa’s Kanin Club to get our monthly quota of crispy pata and crispy tenga and crispy tadyang and some token vegetables. On the way home, everyone else fell asleep while I cruised on the highway at a very civil 90kph (a baby was onboard, lest you think I’m going soft). Over the last few days of the test drive, I did absolutely nothing exciting with the car, just using it to go everywhere in the city. Probably the most exciting part was trying to find it in a crowded parking lot full of Toyotas (painted silver, "my" Altis was as nondescript as it gets), and then panicking for a few minutes as I tried to find the key somewhere in my pants.

As boring as this test drive was, as ordinary and unimaginative as it was on my part to find an excuse to bring it out of my village, I have to say that I finally understood why it’s the top-selling car in the world. For years, it’s also been the number one compact sedan in the country. Not because it’s a fantastic drive, because it is not. Not because it’s a drop-dead gorgeous sex machine, because it is not. Not even because it is cheap, because it is still squarely in the price bracket of the Honda Civic-Ford Focus-Mitsubishi Lancer-Nissan Sentra class. No, no, no. It is the number one selling car in the world because, as embarrassing as this may be for us Backseat Drivers, fewer people give a damn about horsepower figures or how a car presses you into your seat in the curves than they do about real world concerns like reliability and resale value.

Putting myself into a would-be buyer’s shoes, with a hypothetical family to feed and bills to pay from utilities to new underwear (don’t you just hate wearing "bacon" briefs?), what would I be looking for? Of course I would need a good-looking car. I’m not plunking down nearly a million bucks for an ugly one, that’s for sure.

I’d also want it to be all-day-long comfortable, since I’m looking at daily commutes and weekend road trips for the coming years. Then I’d want enough power under the hood to be able to pass rickety jeeps without breaking a sweat. I’d expect it to have all the latest safety kit like airbags and ABS because I’d feel naked without those, even though my dad and my granddad drove safely for decades on just plain seatbelts and drum brakes and common sense.

The stereo has to sound good so I can listen to all my New Wave tunes even though I gave up the punk hairdo twenty years ago. I don’t need the fancy graphics, because figuring it all out distracts me from the practice of texting-while-driving. After five or so years, I’d like to be able to sell it and still get a fair amount of money. Plus, since I hate going to the casa unless I really need to, I’d like to have the option of sourcing parts from good ol’ Banawe and having my favorite mechanic figure everything out in a few hours. Oh, and I would like to have a car that does not consume more gas than it needs to, because it just burns my biscuit every time I have to pay through the nose with every fill-up.

See, this is the kind of thinking that convinced me that, were I to buy a new car, I might actually end up buying an Altis. It is an absolutely unexciting car, a veritable appliance on four wheels, but one which makes perfect sense for legions of conservative buyers who must worry about more serious things in life like house payments and education plans and whether to splurge for a plasma TV or not. It does nothing outstandingly well, but what makes it so successful is that it does everything you’d expect a family car to do very competently. It’s a formula for success that very few competitors (if at all) have ever gotten right.

Even in the face of snazzy opposition like the Mazda3 and the swoopy Honda Civic, it is still holding its own despite being one of the older cars in its class. For decades, it has been Toyota’s ace of diamonds (known elsewhere as the Corolla, of course) — refined, enlarged, and empowered over the years to become a veritable symbol of middle class mobility.

The generation before the current Altis was a misstep because it was smaller and tighter and just too boring (even for a Toyota), but the current car is the best one yet. I can’t imagine anyone actually falling in love with the cheesy fake wood trim or the ornate style of the Optitron meters, but neither can I imagine anyone finding fault with excellent build quality, predictable driving dynamics, a spacious cabin, adequate power OR a surprisingly miserly powertrain. In a mix of highway and urban crawling, I actually got 12 kilometers per liter according to the car’s trip computer. Manila Times Motoring Editor Brian Afuang, who’d also driven the car, got the same figure as well. Two Altis-owning friends are also quite happy with this fuel-efficient motor.

I actually didn’t want to return the car to Toyota when the test drive duration ended. It’s just one of those overly competent and dependable things in life you end up valuing more than that high-strung, high-maintenance machine that’ll be fun for a few months before things start breaking. Right now, of course, the IT car is the Honda Civic, which has a killer combination of good looks, performance, and refinement. Rumor has it that Toyota was all set to pull the wraps off the next-generation Corolla/Altis, but that they decided to go back to the drawing board when they clapped eyes on Honda’s little gem. It’ll be interesting what they’ll come up with to counter the current darling of the local motoring world. Until then, I wouldn’t blame anyone at all if they still chose to buy an Altis. It’s as predictable as the tides, and for a lot of people, which Toyota seems to understand more than most manufacturers, "predictable" can be a very good thing indeed.

Here are some of your comments and reactions from last week, icluding one of the many that pointed out this writer’s shameful oversight (Yikes!). Thanks for being attentive and pointing it out. — Ed.

Just want to correct something, Sportage is a Kia variant not Suzuki. — 09189221451 (You are absolutely right! My bad. My apologies.)

To Mr. Dizon: Thank God your family was not hurt! Please keep after the LTO, and other government agencies, so that they may do their jobs well. — 09167491434

Here in Baguio City, there many cars using TINTED PLATE COVERS. You can hardly see or read their license plates. — 09183439508

Can’t the traffic enforcers compel jeepneys to switch on their headlamps at night? We see so many of them doing nothing. — 09178531454

There are still plenty of smoke belchers especially utility/passenger vehicles. Are the LTO emission tests just a big racket? — 09175111996

Speak out, be heard and keep those text messages coming in. To say your piece and become a "Backseat Driver", text PHILSTAR<space>FB<space>MOTORING<space>YOUR MESSAGE and send to 2840 if you’re a Globe or Touch Mobile subscriber or 334 if you’re a Smart or Talk ’n Text subscriber or 2840 if you’re a Sun Cellular subscriber. Please keep your messages down to a manageable 160 characters. You may send a series of comments using the same parameters.