Why do Uber drivers love the Quest?
Uber drivers can feel your Trumpy vibes and answer to your stern dislike of Britain’s Labour Party. They’ll even share a moan about Zimbabwe. That’s because they’ve done the maths and picked a car that’s good for kids as well as drunks
Regular Uber users will know the feeling. You hail the cab and then wait, bathed in anxiety. For many people, especially women, there are serious things to worry about. Will I be safe? Will the driver be a sleazeball or worse?
For me, the anxiety is reserved for more prosaic things: will I get an Etios or a Corolla Quest? When the Etios arrives, with the torsional rigidity of a malva pudding and rear bearings that drone their nostalgic stories of a 350,000km life on the road, and with NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) levels of a postwar Massey-Ferguson, you just have to roll your eyes and endure the experience.
Sometimes someone will fetch you in a Corolla Quest, though. Everything is about context, and Uber users will know what a joy it is to get into one of these cars. It’s quiet and comfortable, and you get the distinct impression that there aren’t five guys in the bonnet with pneumatic drills doing the motive work.
This may also mean you talk to your driver, if you like, because you can actually hear each other, and then – once again if you are lucky – you will encounter some of life’s greatest therapists and philosophers. Few people get to see the true soul of middle-class humanity as Uber drivers do. They are exposed to people wealthy enough to have credit cards, smartphones and somewhere to be. And they are alone in the car with them. Can you imagine what they hear and see over the course of thousands of trips?
Anyway, I have had many conversations about Zimbabwe with Uber drivers because so many of them seem to come from there. They all seem to say that it’s a great pity what has happened to their country. They sometimes say that the same things are happening here. The views of Uber drivers are in my experience generally conservative. They express anger at corrupt and undemocratic governments and say that people from all walks of life are capable of looking after themselves so long as they are given the right opportunities and a fair crack at things.
Working-class conservatism is sometimes reflected in voting patterns. Left-wing commentators more interested in getting in a blow for the team than enlightening readers will, for example, refer to almost half of America as “Trumpist”. For many, the quality of the snark is too good to sacrifice on the altar of reasonable comment. Actually, many Trump voters just didn’t like the other lot and Donald Trump is merely an expression of the quantum of that dislike. That’s really quite shocking and reveals an altogether different problem. I’m not sure the Democrats are listening.
Referring to working-class people from the north of England who voted in a Conservative government in 2019 as “Tories” is as dishonest and ridiculous. They just didn’t like the militant cosmopolitanism of Jeremy Corbyn and his band of anti-Semites and identity warriors. The quantum of this distaste can only be expressed as “Boris Johnson”.
So, rather circuitously, to my point; for urban elitists a conversation with an Uber driver every now and again might be a good grounding in what voters are thinking because they’re not audible in the Big Bubble of Very Important People.
And that’s not just a political thing. It’s important to take note of what they drive.
Private motorists treat Uber drivers poorly on the road. I have never been as carved-up and barged about and cut off as I was while driving a blue Corolla Quest for a week. Ironically, these are the same motorists who complain about taxis stopping wherever they like, but are happy to enjoy the same functionality when they themselves take an Uber trip.
The Corolla Quest is a reincarnated 11th-generation Corolla recently replaced by the current Corolla. It’s built in Durban with the obsolete model’s old tooling and it is indeed popular with Uber drivers. Why is that? Simply, the savagely competitive market for ride-hailing means that the Uber owners have done the maths for us. They’ve worked out the payoffs between purchase price, fuel consumption, reliability, the cost of spare parts and the likely lifespan of the vehicle and played that off with the requirements for rear legroom, boot space and comfort.
There’s a reason so many drive Quests, and after a week in one I can tell you that they are the same reasons we should all drive them. It’s a completely sensible family car that does everything just fine. It looks really great from the front and boring from the back. It’s got good rear legroom. It’s reasonably fuel-efficient. It’s got some pretty good safety kit, including stability control programs and a collection of airbags (although it’s a pity they can’t stretch to curtain airbags for the kids in the back). It has an absolutely colossal boot. It has Cruise Control. The ride is good. Handling is perfectly okay for a car with a cheaper torsion-beam rear suspension. The steering is light and the car goes where you point it in an inoffensive manner. Its interior is more C-Max than C-suite but it is clearly hugely robust. Great for those with kids or drunk passengers. It will come with Toyota’s legendary reliability as standard fit.
The car comes with a 103kW 1.8-litre naturally aspirated engine. That’s really more than okay – 103kW is enough to keep you interested, to overtake and to do the long haul. You can have a six-speed manual or CVT automatic. I drove the manual, which has a weird and irritating way of reacting slowly to throttle lift-off for a gear change. This sends the revs into the red when you depress the clutch, making you feel like an incompetent idiot. I’d go for the auto.
Other than that the car is, in a fair review, pretty much faultless. Available from R277,000, it’s an astonishingly reasonable number of rands for the amount of brandnew car you get. Compare it, if you will, with the kind of car that everyone is actually buying – small crossover mock-SUVs based on supermini platforms – and you’ll see that it is objectively nonsensical to pay R100k more to get something much smaller, much less powerful, no better off-road and with a tiny boot.
But that’s where we are. The Quest is more than the car we need and yet, for most of us, not the car we want. Strange times. Perhaps we should all talk to an Uber driver.
The Corolla Quest is a reincarnated 11th-generation Corolla recently replaced by the current Corolla. It’s built in Durban with the obsolete model’s old tooling and it is indeed popular with Uber drivers. Why is that?