Toyota Auris Touring Sports (2013 – 2019) Review

While it may not offer vast amounts of excitement, the Toyota Auris Touring Sports is one of the most dependable used cars around. Solid build, low running costs with the hybrid and decent comfort all give it plenty of appeal next to rivals like the Honda Civic Tourer and popular Ford Focus Estate. Read on for our full Toyota Auris Touring Sports review.

Despite the best efforts of the Japanese company, the original Toyota Auris suffered from a character bypass. Although this follow-up is a little easier on the eye inside and out, its main problem is that it inspires absolute indifference.

This is, of course, completely irrelevant to many used car buyers who appreciate the hybrid Toyota Auris Touring Sports estate because of its low CO2, 60mpg capability, phenomenal reliability and low maintenance and repair costs.

The vast majority of Toyota Auris models sold in the UK were hybrids, and that’s no surprise.

Moving up through the trim levels, you come to a car that’s very well equipped, with alloy wheels available from Icon specification upwards, while Business Edition includes ‘Toyota Touch’ multimedia with navigation, Bluetooth and DAB radio.

Further up the range, you’re looking at attractive convenience features such as dual-zone climate control and automatic wipers and lights.

Regardless of trim, the Toyota Auris is a very safe car, with a five-star Euro NCAP rating and the full plethora of safety acronyms on its spec sheet.

This estate version is spacious, too – although not excessively so in the class, with the 530-litre boot around the middle of the pack in pure volume terms. The Ford Focus Estate’s boot is just 476 litres, but the SEAT Leon ST boasts 587 litres, for example.

Fancy a new Toyota Corolla Touring Sports? Read our review here.

The driving position is never less than comfortable, with lots of seat and wheel adjustment, plenty of headroom and a footwell that includes a large left footrest.

That, coupled with the distinctly non-dynamic character of the Toyota Auris Touring Sports, makes this a good motorway car. Indeed, it is much more suited to sitting at 70mph on the motorway than being driven at pace on a back road.

The steering is light, the suspension is better at subduing motorway expansion joints than it is minimising body roll during cornering, plus all the engines are noisy when thrashed, but nicely quiet at a top-gear cruise. Or a generally low-rev one, in the case of the CVT.

If you want to drive enthusiastically at all, the Toyota Auris Touring Sports is not for you – this is a comfortable, sensible car for those looking for reliability and relatively low costs. 

There’s a range of petrols and diesels available in the Toyota Auris Touring Sports, plus one petrol-electric hybrid.

A 99PS 1.33-litre petrol kicks off the range, which sounds like too little for a load-hauling estate car – and is.

That’s largely because it’s got just 128Nm maximum torque, at a stratospheric 3800rpm. The sort of estate you have to empty before negotiating steep hills isn’t a very useful one.

Contrast that to the 116PS 1.2-litre turbo petrol, which has 185Nm of torque that peaks at 1500rpm. A 1.6-litre petrol engine was also offered.

The diesels are better all-rounders. The 90PS 1.4 D-4D makes up in pulling power what it lacks in actual top-end power, with 205Nm from 1800rpm, while the 1.6-litre diesel feels very strong from the off, thanks to 270Nm.

In contrast, the hybrid only has 142Nm, but it comes in at exactly zero rpm courtesy of electric drive. While it feels quick on take-off, it soon runs out of steam as the 1.8-litre petrol engine and electric motor (with 136PS combined) are choked by the CVT automatic gearbox.

This is a drivetrain that’s fine at very low speeds and with a feathered throttle, but try to push it and its asthmatic nature and general din make the Toyota Auris Touring Sports genuinely unpleasant.

Toyota claimed that a full battery will power the car for just over one mile at speeds of up to 30mph, but in our experience this is not achievable, with the petrol engine kicking in virtually as soon as you pull off.

What you’re left with is a lacklustre 1.8-litre petrol engine hauling along a heavy battery and electric motor, which is clearly not conducive to good fuel economy.

Euro NCAP awarded the Toyota Auris a full five stars for crash safety.

All models are fitted with front, side and curtain airbags, although the side chest airbags only serve the front-seat occupants, not those in the rear.

Seatbelt pre-tensioners and belt load limiters are also only on the front seats. The driver gets a standard knee airbag.

Stability control was standard and all five seats get a seatbelt warning reminder.

A speed limiter was only optional, though, and this generation is a bit too old to have more advanced safety assist technology such as lane keep assistance and autonomous emergency braking.

Toyota did introduce a Safety Sense pack for all models from late 2016, but it wasn’t subsequently tested by Euro NCAP.

It’s still worth looking out for, though. Standard gadgets included autonomous emergency braking, plus road-sign assist to detect road signs and display them in the colour monitor within the instrument pack.

Every Toyota Auris Touring Sports is able to tow an unbraked trailer of up to 450kg.

With a braked trailer, the maximum varies between 1000kg and 1300kg depending on the exact model.

There’s a good level of storage throughout the Toyota Auris Touring Sports, with a decent-sized glovebox.

The door pockets are massive as well – big enough for a bottle of Coke. Similarly, the cup-holders moulded into the centre console are drive-thru proof.

The front seats are built for comfort (even the sporty ones in top-end models), but the downside is their thick backrests eat into rear passenger knee room, especially with taller people up front.

If you’re a family buyer, especially with bulky rear-facing child seats to consider, that could be a problem.

Clearly, the main reason for buying an estate ahead of a hatchback is the additional practicality with luggage.

The Toyota Auris Touring Sports fares reasonably well on paper in pure volume terms, plus the lower lip of the tailgate has been shifted down compared with the hatchback for easier loading. The rear seats also fold completely flat with an easy lever tug.

However, the rear suspension eats into the boot sidewalls, meaning you don’t get a perfect oblong shape and, a couple of bag hooks aside, it’s not the last word in carrying versatility.

In that respect it feels more like a ‘hatchback plus’ than a bona fide estate car.

Classy or mundane? Opinions are likely to be split on the slab-faced, highly conservative nature of the Toyota Auris Touring Sports interior.

Whatever you make of it, the understatement makes it easy to negotiate. Unlike in, say, a Ford Focus, you won’t be ferreting around the dashboard for long here to find the button you’re after.

Toyota Auris Touring Sports Icon models get stitched leather-effect trim for the dashboard and a centre console storage box cover, which does lift the ambience somewhat, but still can’t make it feel premium.

The dashboard of the Toyota Auris was built around a high, well-located infotainment screen.

Most models are fitted with the system, which is called Toyota Touch. Only Toyota Auris Touring Sports Active models lack it, replacing it with a conventional car radio instead.

The touchscreen itself is a rather rudimentary system, although it was improved from 2014 with the introduction of Toyota Touch 2 – sat-nav is only standard on versions fitted with Toyota Touch 2 with Go.

The Go system included extra connectivity features, although these now seem a bit dated.

For the 2015 facelift, the infotainment system got a smart new look with a one-piece panel using a piano-black surround. Buttons on the outside became touch-sensitive and the night-time lighting was crisper and more consistent.

It’s still arguably a bit basic, but does at least look more modern at first glance.

You can’t get Apple CarPlay or Android Auto connectivity on any Toyota Auris, meaning your smartphone mirroring will have to be done in a more rudimentary way through the company’s own navigation menus and displays.

You can find a Toyota Auris Touring Sports from around £6000 for a nine-year-old car with 70,000 miles on the clock.

That price gets you a petrol or diesel-engined model, but if you want the popular hybrid, you’re going to have to budget from around £9000 for one of the same age and mileage.

A newer, six-year-old hybrid with 20,000 miles to its credit is going cost as much as £16,000 for a clean, sharp car.

There are various engines to choose from in the Toyota Auris Touring Sports.

The 1.2-litre turbo and 1.3-litre petrol engines will give average fuel economy in the mid-40s according to our Real MPG data, while the 1.6 turns in about 38mpg.

The diesels will appeal to many thanks to their claimed efficiency of up to 68.9mpg, although this works out to about 54mpg in reality.

There’s also a hybrid, which claimed an impressive 78.5mpg officially, and our data shows it can achieve 54.1mpg. This puts it on a par with the diesels, but it’s free to drive into low emissions zones unpenalised.

The other benefit of the hybrid model is that cars registered prior to 1 April 2017 pay no road tax at the time of writing, thanks to sub-100g/km carbon dioxide emissions.

That compares to emissions of 143g/km for the 1.6 petrol and 109g/km for the 1.4 diesel.

Getting insured on a Toyota Auris Touring Sports won’t be too costly, as the range sits in groups 7 to 15 depending on the model, which is much the same as its key rivals.

Maintenance bills should also be easy on the finances, helped by Toyota’s reputation for reliability.

Keep the Toyota Auris Touring Sports serviced with an official dealer, and you can also extend the warranty up to 10 years and 100,000 miles.

Four trims were available at launch – Active, Icon, Sport and Excel. The Toyota Auris Touring Sports Active is pretty basic and rare.

The Toyota Auris Touring Sports Icon includes 16-inch alloys (15-inch on the Hybrid), DAB radio, Toyota Touch infotainment, all-round electric windows, Bluetooth and a rear-view parking camera.

The Toyota Auris Touring Sports Sport trim does what it suggests with 17-inch alloys (16-inch for the Hybrid), sports seats, rear privacy glass and a rear diffuser.

The Toyota Auris Touring Sports Excel also has 17-inch alloys, plus dual-zone climate control (the regular system is single-zone automatic air con), heated leather seats, cruise control, park assist with all-round parking sensors, plus automatic lights and wipers.

In 2014, the Icon became the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Icon Plus, with a few extra gadgets as standard.

The revised 2015 range had a similar span of equipment, and consisted of the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Active, the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Business Edition, the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Icon and the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Excel.

A later Toyota Auris Touring Sports Icon Tech added Toyota Touch 2 with Go sat nav, while the Toyota Auris Touring Sports Business Edition was focused on company car users.