Toyota RAV4

Excellent but not brilliant!

2011 (11)

The interior is very nice with a good finish in leather/fabric. Love the front heated seats on a cold day! Cruise control is essential for me and I find this one ok but a little slow on the uptake when resuming. The phone connects through Bluetooth but no info is shared. So although the car has steering wheel controls for the phone, that's about it. The directory is not transferred to the car and so to make a call, I still have to use the handset.

The dash layout is easy to see although the heater temperature control is digital and so takes quite a bit of time to go from cold to hot or the other way around. Good glove box storage with one of them level with the passenger, so little bending and stretching is required to get something from it.

Annoyingly the coffee cups are so close to the dash, I do struggle to get them out when full of hot drink.

The armrest between the front seats is a little low for me. I am not all that tall and so have the front seat set quite high (it could go higher) and as the armrest is static it is quite low to actually rest your arm on.

The engine is suburb and powerful. Being a diesel the torque is good and handy to have when I need to overtake with a bit of oommfff!! It's also a fairly quiet engine. The fuel consumption is good as I am getting around 35 mpg with quite a bit of higher motorway speeds.

Space in the rear is adequate for three passengers and the overall ride in the rear is comfortable.

The boot space is very clever with two sunken "holds" under lift-up panels to hold shopping from sliding around. The rear seats fold completely flat with two easy reach handles accessible from the rear.

My only wish is that the tailgate opened vertically rather than outwards as it's huge.

Overall I am delighted with the car but I think the phone connection could be better for the business user.

Mr I Reynolds