Toyota Corolla wagon under study for Oz

The Toyota Corolla Touring Sports was revealed in late 2018 but has yet to be given the green light for Australia.

That will probably remain the case for the foreseeable, but it hasn’t stopped Toyota Australia continuing to study the sleek Corolla wagon for the local market.

With a very useful 598 litres of boot space, Toyota’s latest Corolla wagon also gets adaptive dampers – a first for the nameplate.

If the long-body Corolla did get the green-light for the Australian market, it would take on mid-size wagons such as Subaru Levorg, Skoda Octavia and Volkswagen Golf.

And given those three models are offered with high-performance turbo-petrol four-cylinder engines, who’s to say a hot Toyota Corolla GR wagon with a 192kW punch wouldn’t be out of the question?

Probably this guy: Toyota Australia’s sales and marketing boss, Sean Hanley.

He told carsales.com.au that his company will continue to study the business case for the Corolla wagon but that at the moment small wagons don’t generate enough sales to make it worthwhile importing.

“It’s something we’ll continue to look at and I’m sorry to all the people who ask ‘Hey, when are you gonna bring this car to market?’ And I appreciate there is some market for it, it’s just not big enough at the moment,” he said.

Powered by the same conventional and petrol-electric hybrid engines as the Corolla hatch and sedan, the new model has generated a lot of consumer buzz and Hanley is not blind to this.

But just as the popularity of SUVs in Australia saw the axe fall on the Camry wagon, which was effectively replaced by the Kluger, local demand for the Corolla wagon will never approach that of the popular RAV4.

“I read a lot of social media and I see a lot of people on different blogs saying ‘when is Toyota going to bring this Corolla wagon to market’. I’ve gotta say that type of social media commentary has always inspired me to keep looking at this car and has always inspired Toyota Australia to keep studying this car.

“We’ve studied it in the past and we’ll continue to study it in the future,” he said.

“But I gotta say, with the benefit of a lot of thorough study and research into the market, at this stage there still isn’t a strong enough business case to introduce this into Australia.”