Okay, okay, I can tell what you’re all thinking: Who the heck wants to spend P2.15 million on an electric Toyota Yaris Cross?
Or at least, that’s what I was thinking until I saw this thing in the metal. Because it is not, in fact, an electric Yaris Cross. Instead, this is a Maruti Suzuki with a Toyota badge. Somewhat. The Urban Cruiser/e-Vitara twins are the first cars to be built on Suzuki’s new Heartect-e platform, a modular skateboard architecture co-designed with Toyota to support multiple sizes and classes of cars. A bold new all-dancing, all-singing EV project from two of the biggest Japanese car manufacturers on the planet and a direct assault on the Chinese upstarts.
But the question still stands: Who wants to spend that much money on an Indian-made subcompact EV when the Chinese are so much cheaper?
After a week with the car, I’m relatively sure I know who would, but I’m not so sure that enough of those people exist to make this a profitable venture for Toyota. Which is a shame, because this isn’t a bad car. It’s not a great car, either, but we’ll get to that in a little bit.
First things first: the Urban Cruiser and the e-Vitara are 99% identical in looks. The only notable differences are Toyota headlights, an ‘aero’ styled front bumper, and alloy wheels. Well, alloy with plastic hubcaps, but still alloy. It’s rather surprising how well the Toyota front end matches the Suzuki bodywork. The chibi-esque chonkiness of the baby Cruiser looks right at home beside the new FJ Cruiser and Tamaraw. The straight Suzuki rear light bar—by some happy accident—looks nearly identical to the one on the Raize, though it tends to collect condensation in humid weather faster than grandma’s glasses.
The big battery under the floor results in a bottom-heavy design, particularly around the rear haunches. Those huge hips push the rear door handles into the pillars, where they get lost in the black window trim. Big plastic cladding and over-fenders help tame the visual bulk, but the effect is rather lost against the dark Grandeur Gray paint on our test unit.
That said, it is a cohesive design—chunky, exciting, and most important, fun. Fully in keeping with Toyota’s newfound focus on excitement.
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The interior—save for the Toyota badge on the steering wheel—is straight up Suzuki. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I love how the aircon vents look like the grille on the older Jimny. There’s textured vinyl framing the A/C vents and the door handles, and even a bit of LED lighting to spice it up. Nothing too in-your-face, not like some of the Chinese competition.
There’s a dual screen in here, as you’d expect on a new car, but an odd one, with the instrument cluster set low in the panel, leaving a lot of dead screen space above it. The center console features wireless charging, two large cupholders, and a large shifter console with widely spaced physical control buttons. Perhaps not the most efficient use of space, and the piano black is hard to keep clean and scratch-free, but it is nicely designed. Underneath, there’s a lower shelf for wired charging and odds and ends; it’s a bit tight, but big enough for small cameras and bags. The center box is deep enough, but understandably narrow, and—this not being an original Toyota—lacking the double-hinge coolness of the bZ4X.
The seats are nicely detailed—a combination of contrast-stitched leatherette bolsters, breathable mid-panels, and soft fabric center panels giving the impression of premium quality despite relatively ordinary materials and construction. The rear bench is flat but still well-detailed, and the center folds down completely to give you a trunk pass-through, a feature that more crossovers should have.
Sadly, while leg- and elbow room are generous, there’s a distinct lack of headroom in the rear, thanks to the electricals under the seat and the sliding mechanism for the single-pane sunroof. There’s also no place for rear A/C, though there are rear charging points, at least.
The trunk is, in a word, tiny. There’s just 244 liters of space, 310 liters if you remove the tonneau cover, and about 566 liters with the rear seats folded. That’s significantly less than the Raize, and just over half as much as the much roomier Yaris Cross HEV. And the Cross has a spare tire. The Urban Cruiser only has space under the floor for an inflation kit and an emergency charger.
On the bright side, the Urban Cruiser’s technical specs trounce the Yaris Cross HEV. There’s a 177hp electric motor driving the front wheels—fed from a 61kWh battery sourced from Tata. Yes, that Tata. This combination gets the little 1,780kg crossover from 0-100kph in 8.4sec in dry conditions—a fair bit better than the 8.8sec we achieved in the wet weather during our video test. It is a peppy thing, with enough oomph to overtake on the highway, at speeds up to an electronically limited 160kph.
In terms of energy efficiency, it’s a mixed bag. We weren’t particularly impressed with the economy at the start of the drive, but gave it the benefit of the doubt due to bad weather; even when the weather cleared up, efficiency wasn’t impressive. It was possible to hit 9km/kWh on the highway with diligent driving and minimal A/C use—the aero curtains in the front bumper not seeming to have much effect offsetting the brick-like aerodynamics—and average economy on the test hovered around 5-6km/kWh, and 7-8km/kWh on the highway. While that’s better than the 6-7km/kWh we got during the wet video test, we expected a lot more given the small size, but it is what it is. On the bright side, even with the middling efficiency figures, observed range hovered just under 400km in mixed use, which isn’t bad at all.
That big battery can be charged at up to 67kW, allowing you to go from 10% to 80% in about 40 minutes with CCS-2 charging. Not super fast, but good enough for the occasional road trip.
The Urban Cruiser isn’t really a vehicle for long road trips. I know, I know—I did say in the video that it was relatively comfortable on the highway, and it is better than some EVs, but it is still a stiff little car, so YMMV. That stiff setup does make it mildly entertaining to throw around compared to your common Chinese crossover. Relatively wide 225/55 R18 MRF Wanderer EcoTred tires provide decent grip and noise suppression, but we didn’t really have the time or space to really put them through their paces.
The trouble with this crossover comes when crawling on provincial roads, where the short length and stiff springs set the car to hobby-horsing over rippled concrete. Palengke traffic has you feeling the lack of visibility along the sides of the car, thanks to the high beltline and the small rear window. There are cameras, yes, but the resolution is middling, and the side cameras are mounted too close to the body, which makes figuring out distances a bit iffy. Those cameras do come on automatically, but they tend to cause more stress than stress relief.
Aside from the cameras and the parking sensors, you get full Toyota Safety Sense, which works decently for the most part, but does seem to be let down in some situations by the lower-resolution cameras. The adaptive cruise control stomped on the stoppers once or twice in the rain when it erroneously detected a slope as an obstacle. Lane-keeping assist was mostly fine, despite the rain, and the blind-spot monitoring and everything else worked as intended.
Aside from that, you get a 10.25-inch center infotainment screen with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay with wireless functionality, allowing Google or Apple Maps to display on the instrument cluster, which is pretty cool. A nine-speaker JBL sound system gives the Urban Cruiser near-premium-level sound quality and volume. There’s also push-button start and keyless entry—thankfully, the Suzuki key fob is small and easy to pocket, unlike the gigantic, uh, thing that comes with the bZ4X.
Beyond that, there’s little else in terms of creature comforts to justify the high price tag. There’s no keyless start and no automatic tailgate. Granted, the Urban Cruiser is a bit better spec’d than some of its Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts, but those counterparts are just over half the price of the tiny Toyota.
At its current asking price of P2,135,000, the Urban Cruiser is up against bigger and more powerful compact crossovers—most of which are still cheaper than the Toyota, with all the automatic features their smaller cousins are missing. So even if the Urban Cruiser were the best small EV in town, it would still be facing an uphill battle.
Granted, the Urban Cruiser is not a bad car, but it’s a hard sell in this competitive EV market. While we don’t doubt it will sell—people are starved for small Japanese EVs—many Toyota loyalists will instead be looking at the RAV4 HEV, which boasts all-wheel drive, better performance, better ride comfort, better handling, much more interior space, and even a kick-to-open automatic tailgate for not much more money. And unlike the Indian-sourced Urban Cruiser, the RAV4 comes straight from Japan.
Toyota keeps telling people that nobody wants EVs. But that’s not quite true. A lot of buyers want EVs. And some of them will want EVs badly enough to buy this one. But unless Toyota can bring the price down by at least another half million pesos, most of those buyers will be going for Chinese-built EVs instead.
Price: P2,135,000
Powertrain: single electric motor + lithium-iron battery
Power: 172hp
Torque: 193Nm
Transmission: single-speed electric drive
Drive layout: FWD
Seating: 5
Score: 7.5/10
