27 Feb 07
This console annoyed me even further when I parked up in a cramped car park. Such is the nature of London city centre underground car parks, with their inevitable pillars and too-narrow bays, that it's useful to be able to climb from the driver's seat to exit via the passenger door (and to enter vice versa) if the driver's door can't be opened wide enough. Maybe it's just my poor parking skills, but I find myself needing to do this regularly.
And yes, it's a real scramble in the Corolla, sorry, Auris, and utterly undignified when wearing a skirt. Not as undignified as the whole Britney/Paris/Lindsey trend, obviously.
As yet, then, the Corolla-Auris has failed to make much of an impression on me beyond mild irritation.
I don't think I'm alone in this, either: in another car park scenario, I made another failed attempt to get into someone else's Corolla-Auris only to find that he was doing the same with mine. The two cars weren't even anywhere near the same colour; they had made such little impact on us we couldn't even remember whether we had a silvery-blue one or this sort of urine-tinted yellowy-gold shade.
Oh well. There has been one occasion when the car came into its own, however. During the days of the Great British Snowfall (such as it was) I was faced with a 5.30am start on ungritted roads. Suddenly, taking the Auris home looked a much more appealing option than the Mazda RX-8 I was due to drive - and I made it to the airport, unlike my colleague Mr Simister, left stranded in Hemel Hempstead in his fat-tyred Peugeot 207...
