At first glance, the Vista saloon looks like a hurried design job, with its short bonnet and stubby boot flanking a passenger cell gift-wrapped in an acre of glass and sheet metal, but the looks tend to grow on you.
The navy blue that our unwitting test vehicle came in does justice to its lines, and coupled with that chrome nose, it lends the car a regal appearance.
It seems every time we get an interesting Toyota car to drive, we get limited time to spend with it, and we are thus forced to apply some kind of a standardised evaluation sequence to glean as much information about it as we possibly can.
It happened with the Landcruiser 100 VX, and now it has happened again with the Caldina ZZT station wagon, which is a sports wagon, and will thus undergo the Standardised Sporty Vehicle Test.
Well, here goes:
The car is unstable, sad to say. It is very light — and feels so — which means you could also call it nimble, which it is. But ‘nimble’ is not a synonym for ‘good handling’. The car was a bit nervous during hard cornering. Adjusting your line when sweeping round a curve causes an alarming scuttle shake, making the car wiggle a bit.