B6 THE OAKVILLE BEAVER Wednesday, January 12, 2000 Toyota throws out the rule book for building smallcm By Malcolm Gunn SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER he all-new Echo comes with the kind of honesty, goodness and value that helped establish Toyota in North America in the first place. With the myriad of cars and trucks offered by Toyota these days, its easy .to forget that the basic small car, as embodied by the 1966 Corolla, was the one that started it all. Neatly styled, well appointed and, most of all, fun to drive, the first-generation Corolla took the continent by storm, making Toyota as common a brand as Pepsi, Palmolive or Popsicle. As succeeding generations of Corollas grew larger, Toyota responded by introducing a new entry-level small car, the Tercel, in 1978. But after 20 years of playing the role o f a bare-bones transportation standard bearer, the Corolla nameplate was retired last year. The Echo is Toyota's new way of aquainting first time buyers with its cars, while at the same time tossing aside the small car rule book. The Echo takes the m inim alist approach to driving, with your choice of two-door or four-door sedans that look like nothing else on the road today. With the Echo, you can forget about sleek and slender. To keep the Echo small, Toyota has gone and made it tall. So tall, in fact, that there's a black strip o f cladding along the rocker and front T and rear quarter panels that helps give the car a lower silhouette. Front passengers sit high off the ground in armchair-like seats that seem like they belong in a minivan, and the rear bench is also similarly construct ed. The unusual dashboard features instrumentation and controls that are positioned half-way between the driver and front passenger in a style reminis cent of 1950s English imports like the Morris Minor that were built for either left, as well as right-hand drive. The net result of the Echo's physical shape is a car that may not win any beauty contests, but is sure to pick up the congeniality prize for its exception ally spacious and practical cabin. Under the hood, the Echo is as hightech as anything Toyota puts on the road. Power is provided by a 1.5-litre twin-cam, 16-valve four-cylinder engine worth 108 horsepower. The engine features variable valve timing that is now standard fare on a number of Toyota powerplants. It is also a major contributing factor in the Echo's perfor mance that, Toyota claims, will allow it to keep up with cars like the Honda Civic, Chrysler's Neon and Ford Focus. You can hook this engine up to either a five-speed manual, or optional fourspeed automatic transmission. As you might expect with the Echo's basic transportation philosophy, you don't get a ton of standard features other than a six-speaker AM/FM/cassette sound system. 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