Despite what people think of the Toyota Corolla, I myself am not a Corolla fan. For me, in my honest opinion, Corollas are boring, bland to drive and not really for me.

However, I see the reasons why these Corollas are very popular and with a family friend recently buying the new Corolla Ascent Sport sedan with automatic transmission late last year, we drove down to Canberra from Western Sydney in his new Corolla.

The Ascent Sport comes with extra features with Bluetooth, front fog lights, sports bucket seats, 16 inch alloys and unlike the regular Ascent, it comes with cruise control, audio controls on the steering wheel and leather steering wheel. These are the features that I believe are necessary in your new car.

The ride down to Canberra was a comfortable and very smooth one; we didn't feel any bumps along the way. The handling felt great and doing U-turns with ease.

The interior is quite bland and outdated but the controls for radio, air-con and your coffee are positioned correctly and you won't have to take your eyes off the road just to turn your air-con on or tune your radio. The sports bucket seats is very comfortable and had no strains to my neck, shoulders and back after we arrived 2 and a half hours later in Canberra.

Fuel efficiency is an issue and quite misleading with the Corollas despite it saying "7.4L100km", we filled it up to full tank with Unleaded 95 at a service station before we hit the freeway and by the time we got to Canberra after 270km, it has used up more then half the tank which I believe it is very poor especially for a 1.8L engine and only doing between 100-110km/h on the freeway.

The style is outdated despite its facelift to the front and having LED tail lights.

The 4-speed auto, while it's smooth, it too is outdated and while doing 100km/h the engine noise was quite loud and annoying so let's hope Toyota introduces a 6-speed auto in their new models.

However, despite its cons, it is a car for people who want basic accessories in their car and want to use the car for basic city driving. I would recommend the Corolla Ascent Sport if people are looking into buying a new car in its class. The price starts from $24,490 for the Automatic Ascent Sport sedan.