SPY PICS: Toyota's new Corolla sedan surfaces

Toyota's four-door sedan follow-up to its new Corolla five-door hatch, which is due for Australian introduction in August is slowly revealing itself. This latest round of spy photos indicates that what lies underneath will be virtually identical to recent photos published in a Japanese car magazine.

While it appears the front of the car, through to the B-pillars, will virtually replicate the 2018 Toyota Corolla hatchback, the rear end follows the usual sedan principles of extending the rear to provide more boot space. The current Toyota Corolla sedan boasts a useful 470-litre load capacity. We would expect Toyota to at least replicate that for the new car, although it hasn't achieved that with the new Toyota Corolla hatch, which is about 10 litres smaller in the boot than its predecessor.

Among the small visual differences in the sedan's front half, there will be a small window ahead of the external rear-view mirrors and, if our eyes don't deceive us, revisions to the lower sections of the Corolla hatchback's gape-mouthed front end.

The extended boot will not only help the sedans' load capacity, but will also bring a more conservative profile that should sit well with the sedan's buyer demographic. Where the Toyota Corolla hatchback draws heavily from Toyota's newly-developed design language, the sedan looks altogether restrained.

We're also presuming that, like the current Toyota Corolla, the sedan wheelbase will be longer than that of the hatchback, although that's by no means certain, with the new hatch entering the American market to sell alongside the sedan. At 2700mm, the wheelbase of today's sedan is 100mm longer than the due-for-replacement hatch.

As well as being based on Toyota's new NGA-C modular platform which also underpins the latest Camry, C-HR and Prius, the next-gen Corolla sedan will also get the 126kW/205Nm 2.0-litre engine soon to be seen in the hatch. The Corolla sedan will use, in conjunction with a base six-speed manual gearbox, the upcoming hatchback's new CVT auto transmission. Driving through a high final drive ratio, the CVT is intended more for economic motoring than performance. Yet the engine's extra power promises a lot more pep than that provided by the ancient 1.8-litre engine, which does produce 103kW/173Nm in its latest guise.

Like the Corolla hatch, the sedan can be expected to come with the same line-up of standard safety gear, which is claimed by Toyota to be class-leading and includes autonomous emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian avoidance and lane-keep assist.

No word yet on when Toyota will drop the Corolla sedan into its Australian product portfolio, but speculation points to a local launch not too far behind its expected international introduction in 2019.