Toyota Urban Cruiser review

Very, very simple. In a good way. There are far too many cars that don’t get the basics right, but not here: the accelerator is prompt and predictable, the brakes are smooth and faithful, and although the steering doesn’t tell you much about what the front tyres are up to, there’s a fluidity to it that makes the Urban Cruiser adept at whipping around sharp corners.

Sadly that’s about where its strengths fizzle out. It runs Macpherson strut front and multi-link rear suspension, but that does little to protect you from bumps and ruts, and big potholes upset the balance of the car if you happen to be changing direction at the same time.

Its cornering ability can be summed up in one sentence: it doesn’t roll all that much, but it pogos heavily and so doesn’t hold its trajectory very well. Moving on.

Electric cars are meant to be quiet. Is this?

Because there’s no engine, other typical driving sounds – tyre roar, buffeting, you know the kind of thing – are free to dominate instead. Oh goodie. Toyota talks about insulated windscreen glass and sound-deadening baffles to lower intrusions from outside, but they’re ineffective here, especially when your speed climbs above 60mph. And once you’ve noticed the vibration through the steering wheel, it’s very difficult to un-notice. Hmm.

The Urban Cruiser does at least live up to the second part of its name – it’ll trickle along very happily on the motorway, and shows no sign that it’d be out of puff at 93mph if you were legally allowed to get there.

Any driving modes to speak of?

Some normcore ones, yeah. There’s a button on the centre console to toggle through Eco, Normal and Sport, and another to engage *adopts movie trailer voice* Snow mode. That controls torque to reduce rear wheel slip when, you guessed it, the road ahead is blanketed in the white stuff.

There are also three levels of regen braking, so you can either pick your favourite and leave it there or adjust it accordingly for heavy traffic or dual carriageway cruising. The setting is buried in the touchscreen though, so you can’t adjust it on the hop. Madness.

Remind me of the range again?

The 144bhp, 49kWh Urban Cruiser claims 214 miles, while the 144bhp, 61kWh version logs 265 miles WLTP. We’ve tested the latter and found the official numbers to be far-fetched: the best we could get out of it (admittedly on a miserably wet and cold January day) was 2.75 mi/kWh, or 165 miles total. Ouch.

No doubt that would improve in warmer weather, but having got a vastly better return from the recently updated bZ4X only a week earlier, it suggests efficiency is painfully limited. Which is only compounded by the relatively slow DC charging speeds.

Anything else to note?

Yes, the Urban Cruiser is fitted with various safety gadgets because a) car manufacturers care about keeping you alive, and b) many of them are required by law. So you get handy stuff like a blind spot monitor and a pre-collision system, but also annoyances like speed limit warning and lane keep assistance.

Happily you can configure these in the touchscreen, something that’s devilishly tricky in other Toyotas. Finally some common sense.