Toyota Corolla Verso: A cool ride

Whisper it, but the Corolla Verso actually is, admits Michael Booth

I admit it: sometimes a great car does slip through my net. When the Toyota Corolla Verso was launched in 2004, I recycled the press release as printer paper without giving it a second glance. I thought it was just a bog-standard Corolla with a trick rear bench.

By way of an excuse, the Corolla has always been the epitome of worthy-but-dull motoring and I did not intend to take up your precious Sunday reading time with one when I had Lamborghinis and Aston Martins to fry. But I was wrong.

This I discovered when a friend, ignoring my standard advice to buy a second-hand Subaru, bought one. But even then I didn't twig at first what a fantastically adaptable, practical and actually quite cool set of wheels Toyota's Corolla Verso could be. In fact, realisation didn't come until a long-planned trip to the Thames Estuary for an attempt to break the world record for stone skimming (38 bounces, by Jerdone Coleman-McGhee on the Blanco River, Texas, in 1992), with the same friend and five others, came to fruition and we had to find some appropriate transport.

At the time, my old Citroën (since sold) was in the midst of one of its monthly hydraulic conniptions (which, I am convinced, follow the lunar cycle) and my loan car that week was a Lamborghini Gallardo. You can actually squeeze a couple of very compact passengers on to the luggage bench behind the seats of a Gallardo. Unfortunately, none of my friends could be categorised thus and, also, it's illegal. The record-breaking attempt seemed doomed until my friend offered up his Corolla Verso which, unlike the last Verso - a mere five-seater - has seven seats.

The trip went swimmingly (see below) - although I do seem to recall hearing muffled screams of pain from the two grown-ups consigned to the tight, third row of seats - and I came away deeply impressed not just by the Corolla's capaciousness but by the quality of its interior and pleasingly confident styling. (And these days you can have your Toyota painted in an exquisite palette of colours - bronzy browns, complex metallic greys - like semi-precious geological samples.)

I was so impressed that, soon after, I rang up Toyota and asked to borrow one for a week. They sent me a top-of-the-range, 2-litre diesel D-4DT, which costs a hefty £19,795, mostly because it comes with TV screens in the rear head rests and a built-in DVD player (the range starts at £14,495 for the 1.6-litre petrol version, but even that comes with air conditioning, nine air bags and a CD player as standard). Prior to having my own children, a built-in DVD player would have brought out the Luddite in me. What is wrong with looking at the scenery, for goodness sake? But now I have kids, I admit, a built-in DVD would save me a fortune in sedatives (for them) and tranquillisers (for me) for every journey over 10 miles.

I am obliged to point out that rivals such as the Renault Grand Scenic, VW Touran and Vauxhall Zafira have the Verso beat on boot space when all their seven seats are filled, but I would take the Toyota's superior reliability record (this one is built in Turkey, but seems none the worse for it), and the peace of mind that brings, every time. If you only ever buy one car in your life, you could do worse than this.

The trip went swimmingly

We came tantalisingly close to claiming the record, until we actually started the skimming of the stones and found six bounces was our absolute limit, and even this required quite a creative interpretation of what constituted a "bounce".