Corolla Cross HEV takes the sting out of all the hybrid lingo

We are well into the second month of living with the updated Toyota Corolla Cross and the more we drive it, the more we understand why this is South Africa’s number one SUV.

The fight for the key in my house is real and that’s because it just does so much right. Without any fuss or fanfare. Our specific test car is the luxury XR spec but with HEV designation, which means it is a petrol-electric hybrid. But the moment anybody says anything electric when it comes to vehicles, many people just switch off for a choice of better words. The other half don’t really understand what this all means.

Let’s talk hybrid

I can tell you, my family is no better. Say “hybrid” and they get that same blank look on their faces. But allow me some time to try explaining what it all means other than to say that we have averaged just 5.4 litres per 100km over the 4 000km we have had this Corolla Cross. Don’t worry about HEV, BEV, PHEV or whatever EV. But be this as it may, what is a hybrid?

The first part is easy, it is a vehicle that is driven by two or more power sources. That mostly means you have an everyday internal combustion engine paired with an electric motor. Where it starts to get a bit more higher-grade is in the prefixes like “mild” or “plug-in”. This explains how these two combine and work together.

A mild hybrid like the Toyota Hilux 48V means that there is an integrated 48 volt battery system that powers a small electric motor connected to the engine. This electric motor is not strong enough to power the vehicle on its own and the battery can only recover or recuperate its energy when you deaccelerate and/or apply the brakes.

Electric assistance

This recovered energy, which in the case of the Hilux 48V, translates into an extra 12kW/65Nm being on tap for short periods of time, is then used to assist the vehicle when accelerating. This in turn gives you a small boost in performance and a saving in fuel consumption.

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A plug-in hybrid runs very much on the same principle of having electrical assistance for the internal combustion engine set-up. But this bigger battery can be charged by plugging the vehicle into a charger at home or a public quick charger. This electric motor is strong enough to power the vehicle in complete electric mode and up to highway speeds and above.

It also gets you anything from around 60km to 160km of range (battery size dependant). It is also used to improve the vehicle’s performance by seamlessly combining its power and torque with that of the internal combustion engine.

Corolla Cross a self-charging hybrid

The hybrid system in the Corolla Cross HEV is again the combination of electricity and internal combustion engine. But you don’t have to plug in the vehicle to charge the battery. Yet the electric motor is strong enough to run the vehicle in complete electric mode for short periods of time at low speeds such as when you are driving in stop/start traffic.

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The internal combustion engine charges the battery and clever electronics decide when you should be saving some battery power or using it for extra power and torque.

I hope some of that made sense in the most basic way, and since we are taking performance, The Citizen Motoring did take our Corolla Cross to Gerotek. And no, it was not because I wanted to do a high-performance test on it. I had used it as my transport to get there to test a bunch of other cars and thought, what the heck, lets run our hybrid and see what happens.

I am not going to try and spin you a story that it was fast. The car makes a total 90kW of power and 142Nm of torque, so it’s never going to light up the leader board, but nobody who buys one expects it to. Next month, we will be wrapping up our time with car and I have no doubt it will continue to impress until the day it leaves.

Corolla Cross road test data