It’s a rental Corolla. You know the drill by now.

So to preface the story of automotive negligence and abuse, how’s about a little bit of actual information eh?

The 2022 Corolla SE is a perfectly fine little car. The paint quality is nice upon inspection, the revamped styling over the prior generation makes the little car infinitely more attractive, at least in hatch form, although it does look like a fish preparing for war. Like a trout or something.

The interior is fine, dash has a nice design, materials are about what you’d expect for an economy hatch, however being 2022 and this car in particular only having about 6000 miles in it, it’s not an awful place to be. Infotainment is responsive, and it has CarPlay, Android Auto, etc. Also all four windows are automatic, unlike a 2018 STI…………… Subaru……………..

It’s not the best behaved or most well composed, but it’s enjoyable enough for what it is. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to it being light and how much of that is the factory setup, but for the most part, it was sharp enough and felt very light. The brakes are more or less normal, though braking into a corner managed to make the rear end get really squirmy in a very funny way. The both pedals feel like toys, the brakes feel like a sloth with Tourette’s, and the gas pedal is more of a suggestion for the engine to complain louder. The tach shows a tiny little i4 that’ll get to near 7k rpm, but the exhaust note just complains about any input that isn’t gentle acceleration. The CVT has 10 selectable ratios for you to mindlessly play with. It’s surprisingly quick to respond though, we found that the lever seems to be slightly quicker than the paddles, or at least the action of moving it up or down masks the delay that flicking a paddle can’t.

It’s a perfectly fine little econobox, and doesn’t try to egg you on. Drive it normal, and I think your metabolic rate will start to decrease until you reach inner peace. It’s an inoffensive angry faced red egg, with a wiper fluid dipstick that looks like anal beads (no actually). Its a comfy but cheap existence to get you where you need to be, can make a twisty road between A and B a bit more enjoyable than a Mirage or Spark, and do that without fail for the next ten years.

So this is when the MSIMA group gets our grubby little hands on the poor car. Ya know it has lift off oversteer? Didn’t take long to find that out.

We’ve drifted a j30, drove an mx5 until it refused to continue, and took a W126 420 SEL for multiple Everglades expositions (article to come soon), so…

Everglades it is! And so follows a 20 or so minute drive out to 3/4 road (it’s a short tarmac then long gravel road that branches out to multiple levees and roads west of US27. It’s wonderful, isolated, a usually fairly pretty. If you can, go check it out). Barreling down the dirt road, passing pickup trucks in the dead of night, we reach our destination. About ten minutes prior, we finally turned off all of Toyota’s American side, and almost all foreign interventions into the land of fun ceased. There was still a covert operation to try and cut throttle, but we persisted. We validated this when our resident Pimp started to get the little ‘rolla unsettled.

The destination was an open dirt patch by a large pumping station. There are many of these in south Florida to keep it from imploding after we drained the Everglades and tried to play god with housing developments. What followed what a mild dosage of tomfoolery, and a lot of reverse doughnuts. I don’t think we’ve laughed our asses off that hard in a while. Nor has that poor Toyota been pushed that far out of its design constraints or us been that dizzy, but the resulting dopamine rush was worth the physical and mechanical punishment.

The night didn’t end there, but you’ll probably guess at what the rest of the details entail. From rushing back home on US27 to driving at a brisk pace down some curvy roads with a gt350 in chase, all the while the rear end of the damn thing is swinging back and forth under braking like a 6 year old loaded with sugar and let loose on a playground, to the warehouse autocross. Dipshits we where, fun we had, and the little Corolla Hatch soldiered on none the wiser.

Except for the smell, good god it lingerd.