In a quiet corner of FAW Toyota’s Auto Guangzhou stand sits the facelifted 12th generation Toyota Corolla sedan – surprising considering it’s the most popular version of what remains the best-selling car of all time. The lack of attention to this car belies the significant changes that have been made, intended to keep it fresh after a whopping seven years on the market.
As seen in a previous leak, the Corolla gets an all-new front fascia that takes a page from the latest Prius and Camry, featuring Toyota’s latest ‘hammer head’ design, framed by C-shaped headlights. Lower down you’ll find L-shaped bumper corners with integrated fog lamps that lead to the slimmer central air intake.
The cross-spoke alloy wheels are also new and look suspiciously like the wheels of the facelifted sixth generation Lexus ES from 2015 – they even have the same 17-inch diameter. Also, a black triangle has been added to the trailing edge of the rear side windows to visually elongate the greenhouse, while at the rear an illuminated red strip has been added to connect the (now smoked) inverted L-shaped taillights.
Even bigger changes can be found inside. There’s a much more modern dash and door card design with full-width vents and another row of central vents below. Below that you’ll find a wider center console with dual smartphone holders (one of which houses a Qi wireless charger), as is now fashionable in China.
The Corolla still uses an 8.8-inch digital instrument display, but the center touchscreen is now a floating unit measuring a whopping 12.9 inches across, running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip. Controversially, the physical air conditioning switches have been replaced by touchscreen controls; it remains to be seen whether this will carry over to global markets, where the car’s typical buyer profile tends to be much more conservative.
It’s all changing under the hood too. We’re abandoning the 1.2 liter 9NR-FTS four-cylinder and 1.5 liter M15B-FTS three-pot engines in the Chinese market, in favor of a 171bhp 2.0 liter M20E-FTS naturally aspirated mill likely mated to a CVT. There’s also a hybrid model that uses a 98bhp 1.8-litre Atkinson engine and dual electric motors, along with a new nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery. Toyota claims this variant has a combined fuel consumption of 4.13 liters per 100 km and a range of 1,041 km.
Could we see the facelifted Corolla in global markets like Malaysia? Such a far-reaching upgrade is certainly necessary, considering the age of the twelfth generation and the fact that the existing next-gen model still seems far away from reaching production. However, we’ll likely get a less fancy infotainment system and a different engine – probably the same 139hp/172Nm 2ZR-FE 1.8-liter Dual VVT-i mill as before.
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