Toyota Urban Cruiser (2025 - ) review

The full price of the Urban Cruiser looks expensive compared to the Nissan Leaf which qualifies for the electric car grant and offers a larger range and more tech for the money. However, Toyota has promised it will be offering competitive deals on finance. If you can charge at home using a dedicated EV energy tariff the Urban Cruiser shouldn’t cost much to run, but public charging regularly will be more considerably expensive.

The Urban Cruiser is a new model so it’s too soon to know how reliable it will be in the long run. However, electric cars have fewer moving parts than petrol or diesel equivalents, so in theory there’s less to go wrong. The Urban Cruiser is a result of a collaboration between Toyota and Suzuki, and both brands have solid reputations for durability. For extra peace of mind, the Urban Cruiser comes with a three-year/60,000-mile warranty which will be extended by an extra year each time you get your car serviced at an approved Toyota dealership until the car is 10 years old.

We applaud Toyota for packing even the entry-level model with all the safety systems as standard. These include lane keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, and blind spot monitoring which is one of the most useful advance driving aids going. Unlike many brands, Toyota gets the balance right and the safety tech feels genuinely helpful rather than overly intrusive, so you don’t feel like you are constantly being nagged. However, we did find the headlights on our mid-range Design test car to be disconcertingly dim to the point that we were worried they might not even be on. Top of the range Excel models get a fancier adaptive LED high beam system, though, which we would hope improves matters.

The Urban Cruiser has been designed with flexibility in mind. As such, the rear seats slide back and forth with a 60:40 split, while all three seats fold down individually. However, with the seats all the way back, the boot isn’t particularly large and maximising the boot space leaves little legroom for rear passengers. Upfront, there’s plenty of headroom, but the high centre console eats up most of the space between the seats making it feel quite cramped. We do like the driving position which gives a clear view over the bonnet, but the seats are very firm, and the lack of lumbar support is noticeable on longer journeys. Out on the road you can feel every ripple in the surface and there’s a constant rumble of road noise providing an accompanying audio description. Things do improve once you get onto smooth motorways, though.

The line-up starts with Icon trim which comes with a 10.1-inch central infotainment screen, a slightly larger digital driver display, a reversing camera and parking sensors, all of which do the job, but none are especially sophisticated. The touch-screen is slow to respond with fiddly menus, the reversing camera doesn’t help with the huge rear blind spots and the parking sensors beep sporadically. You do, however, get a few physical toggles for some of the heating functions and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto which we appreciate. Moving up to Design trim you’ll gain heated front seats, a heated steering wheel and heated door mirrors. Meanwhile range-topping Excel models get larger wheels, a JBL sound system, panoramic roof, wireless phone charging and partial synthetic leather upholstery. All models also come with a heat pump as standard, although the jury is out as to how much this really helps improve efficiency in cold weather.

Icon models get a smaller battery with less range while from Design trim and above the Urban Cruiser gains a larger battery and slightly more power. This longer-range version has an official range of up to 264 miles, but we managed less than 150 miles when we drove it on a motorway in winter. These conditions are like Kryptonite to all electric cars, so we’d hope for an improvement in summer, but we did think the Urban Cruiser’s efficiency was rather disappointing. The Urban Cruiser is not as punchy as rivals like the Renault Megane E-Tech, but it does accelerate and brake smoothly making it easy to drive. There’s a choice of three drive modes, though they don’t drastically change how the car behaves. The steering is nicely weighted for urban driving but not very engaging on a twisty country road, so it’s best enjoyed at a gentle pace. You can increase the amount of regenerative braking using physical button on the centre console and there are also three further regenerative braking settings you can select in the touch-screen menus, although oddly you can’t adjust these while on the move.