One point eight liters of naturally aspirated glory paired with six short ratio gears aught to be fun right?
The Scion iM was produced for the 2016 model year before Scion fell and it was rebadged as the Toyota Corolla iM. Luckily its just a Toyota Corolla Auris outside of the United States sharing the ubiquitous Toyota corolla platform along with the same 1.8L engine. Parts for everything are cheap and common. Though it does come with independent rear suspension whereas the corolla is a torsion beam, and wears a wider set of 225/45/17's as standard.
The interior has good materials with soft touch on the right surfaces, being an economy car cheaper plastics can still be found but they are not agregous. The seats ride a bit high, if your over 6ft there will be room but not much. Pedal placement is poor in the sense that the brake is 4 miles from the throttle so heel-toe is near impossible.
As you’d expect the touchscreen can pair to your Bluetooth, there are steering wheel buttons for taking calls, volume, and skipping songs along with key physical buttons on the dash for volume and home. Navigation of the screens is quick and it has never been a source of frustration. The screen also doubles for the standard backup camera. The stereo is one of the best standard setups I’ve seen with a solid mid and bass.
The ride is soft and controlled, roadnoise is adequately muffled and it’ll eat miles with the limiting factor being the admittedly decent seats.(just not decent after sitting for 8 hours straight)
Handling is expectedly soggy. The steering has absolutely no feel, knowing what the tires are doing has everything to do with sound and nothing to do with steering feel in this car. Understeer, the TCS system does quite a bit to make the car feel stable I suspect by shuffling brakes to each corner as necessary. Turn TCS off and the car feels much different, still numb steering but a tad more neutral as the rear end has more to say about weight transfer. It ends up being a large shift in handling that requires a couple minutes to adjust as the car goes from feeling planted to slightly unstable.
This is a 6 speed because its has to be. The 1.8L making 137hp tries valiantly but the cars heavy at around 3000lbs. Highway driving is frustrating in the PNW, any whiff of a grade and you’ll be downshifting into 5th at 70mph to stay in the powerband at 4k. If you shift too late you’ll have to resign into 4th and crawl the miles of highway at 55-60mph while still winding the engine out. Its the classic underpowered car experience of gaining momentum before the hill then bleeding it off and downshifting into the powerband praying the grade dosent get steeper.
The power is adequate for city driving and merging onto the highway but the engine being gutless will become apparent past 3rd gear. For driving backroads theres enough power for fun, its slow car fast so nothing new.
Flaws: The engine tuning on the manual trans. It has a system of trying to,”help” starts from a stop where it will partially modulate the throttle while you release the clutch. This is an immense PITA, it seems the throttle sensitively changes for starts but the value of change depends on where the clutch is. Example: Give it almost any amount gas before releasing the clutch and the car will rev out to 2k, breath on the gas as you release the clutch and it will rev out as it catches the clutch then tank the rpm because you were barely on throttle. Its hard to explain how difficult this system is.
Also it does a lazy Rev match on downshifts but not adequate as its a sloppy slow rpm increase that rarely matchs, sometimes it will raise rpm on upshifts because it thinks you were going to downshift. Incredible revhang is a given.
Overall I’m happy with the car, its eaten over 2500 miles in the past month of ownership and I could see living with it for quite a while. Its hard to recommend it though primarily because its gutless and the clutch truly is an abomination(maybe in 10k miles I’ll have the hang of it better)