Toyota Hiace

On the inside too, Toyota has not made many efforts in pleasing your eye for aesthetics, as the cabin too has a very basic and cost-effective appeal to it.

The four-spoke steering wheel with huge centre boss and a full analog instrument console look very dated and feel like they belong to a vehicle from two decades ago. The rest of the dashboard has a busy and slightly fussy layout, which thanks to lack of features, looks totally bland.

The geometrically designed dashboard has multiple rectangular bits, and features a rectangular housing for a single DIN music system, rectangular AC vents on its sides and a weird looking housing layout for the AC controls.

Behind the driver’s cockpit, which can seat two people including the driver, there is a huge compartment area that can carry a huge amount of cargo luggage, thus serving its purpose of a traditional van. However, in terms of features, it simply has an audio system and front power windows - that’s it.

For the Malaysian market, the Toyota Hiace is available only in its commercial van guise, which means that it has not much focus on visual appeal and design aesthetics. The Hiace looks quite boxy and boring, which has been purely designed for a purpose.

The Toyota Hiace comes with a rakish windscreen and flat front fascia, which consists of a two slat grille at the centre, which is flanked with boxy simple halogen headlamps on either sides. The front bumper is quite sizeable and is finished in black, thus looking quite basic in its design.

The side profile of the Toyota Hiace is completely van-like, with a boxy layout and manual sliding doors. The very basic black finished door handles and outside rearview mirrors as well as wheel caps are few more cost-cutting measures.

At the back too, the fully-flat design for the rear door, along with vertical tail lamps on the outer edges and rectangular windscreen generate a sense of a basic design. All in all, the Toyota Hiace looks very basic and functional.

The Toyota Hiace has a simple boxy structure and a basic suspension setup of a double-wishbone with torsion bar at the front and leaf springs at the rear. While this suspension setup and body structure are purely uninspiring from the driver’s point of view, with nervy handling and stiff ride quality, the suspension is sturdy enough to carry full load with ease. The 15-inch wheels on which the Hiace rides is just okay for the job.

The Toyota Hiace has a 2.5-litre four-cylinder diesel engine to power it, which is quite basic in its specifications. The engine, which is offered with a 5-speed manual gearbox as standard, produces a maximum power output of 102 PS and a maximum torque output of 260 Nm. While the figures aren’t that impressive by today’s standards, the engine has a good amount of low-end torque, which gives it the necessary thrust to ensure that it doesn’t bottom out in full load conditions.

In the name of safety, the Toyota Hiace has been tailor-made for the job getting just the basics like dual front airbags, seat belt pre-tensioners with load limiters and remote central locking.

The Toyota Hiace is very basic in its appeal – its boxy design and the spartan cabin is in no way appealable in any sense. However, for a commercial van, it has got its roots set right, with a large cargo area, low maintenance costs, sturdy mechanicals under the skin and good after-sales service from the brand Toyota, which has a certain peace of mind which is hard to match by other commercial vans.