TOYOTA’S SEVEN SEAT BARGAIN The Japanese are renowned for their short car model life cycles, but the previous Toyota Corolla Verso lasted just two years before it was replaced by an all-new car in 2004. And it wasn’t long before the model name changed again, with the car becoming just the Toyota Verso. It’s obvious why, now, as Toyota has killed the Corolla name in this country to replace it with the Auris but didn’t want to kill the Verso. It made the change early enough so that only idiots like me have noticed it. In fact Glass’s Guide still refers to it by its old name. Perhaps someone should tell them - they would probably answer they are not that easily fooled. But what a great car the Verso is. Prices start at less than £15,000 new and for that you get a fully fledged seven seater, which makes it very good value. But go for a used one and it could be on your drive for less than 10 grand. Toyota decided that although the best sellers in this sector had only five seats there’s valuable extra sales to be gained through offering seven. Volkswagen learned that lesson with its Touran, which was offered with five seats or seven for £500 more. After a short while, the seven seats became standard and the five seat model was deleted, the obvious inference being that when seven seats are available it’s what the punters want. The Verso comes with a very good system that allows all seven seats to stay in the car all the time. With many MPVs, you end up removing some of the seats when you want to carry loads, with the inevitable result that a journey can either be for carrying loads or people but not the two if you want full load capacity in one direction and full seating capacity in the other. Toyota has a system it calls Easy Flat-7, where all the seats in the rear two rows simply disappear into the floor with headrests in place, too, so there’s no fiddly messing about with removing bits first. Pull one handle on each seat and down it goes. A snag with any seven seater of the Verso’s size is that you can’t easily carry seven adults in the car at once. Compromises on legroom have to be made, but sliding the centre row slightly forward to achieve this is easy. All three individual centre chairs slide on their own so it’s possible to have a combination of seat positions. With all seven seats in place, boot space is understandably limited. But flip down the third row and there’s masses of room of the sort MPV owners have really come to appreciate. The two litre D-4D common rail diesel engine is the one to have. It blends 50 mpg economy with decent performance and the Verso also handles well for an MPV. The range-topping T Spirit comes equipped to suit today’s kids. In the backs of the front headrests are video screens to make use of the standard DVD player or your own games console. What happened to the days when kids looked out of the windows and played I Spy to amuse themselves? Service intervals stretch to 20,000 miles for the petrol cars but only half that for the diesels, while insurance starts at a very lowly Group 5, a brilliant rate for a seven seat car although it only applies to the 1.6 petrol. I reckon I could happily live with the T2 base model, which costs £"10,700 with the diesel on an 04 plate. That’s a premium of £725 over the 1.6 petrol and it’s worth the extra. When they were new, the heftier price variation made it a different story. If you like the idea of nearly new, a 1.8 petrol T Spirit on a 56 is £15,600, a £3,500 saving on new. Maurice Hardy