There's a long tradition of motoring journalists scoffing irritably at car advertising campaigns, and who am I to go against it? The keyword in the current marketing for the Toyota Yaris is bigsmall, and while this isn't nearly as bad as the daftness that was created for the Nissan Micra ("modtro", for heaven's sake - "spafe", forsooth), it still narks me a bit.The cause of my narkation is that although the Yaris is indeed big on the inside, as suggested by the ads, it's also quite big on the outside. It is not the miracle of packaging that the marketing bods would like you to believe. But even among its rivals in the supermini class (a type of vehicle which is growing on average more substantial with every new model that's launched), the Yaris is undoubtedly a roomy vehicle.Space for rear passengers is particularly impressive - the Japanese are on the whole exceptionally good at that - but if you don't need to carry any of those the back seats can be folded by way of Toyota's Easy Flat system. The boot floor seems high, extending not quite as far off the ground as the level of the sill, but there's more room underneath it for items you'd prefer to keep hidden.The test car comes in the top half of the Yaris price list, with its mid-range T3 specification and excellent 1.4-litre D-4D turbo diesel engine. The other available engines are smaller and non-turbocharged, and use petrol for fuel, so the D-4D is the one to go for if you want performance and economy.Actually, with just 89bhp available, the D-4D doesn't seem on paper like it's going to be quick, but there's so much mid-range grunt that it never feels slow. It does, however, always sound like a diesel, or in the case of the test car it did before I put unleaded in the tank by mistake, which is a whole nother story.Colleagues are still astonished that I goofed to such an extent, and I can't quite understand it myself. In all driving conditions the Yaris sounds diesely, as if Toyota simply couldn't come up with a way of preventing the noise coming into the cabin.More positively, it has a diesel's lack of thirst, too. The official combined economy figure is 62.8mpg, and while I'm not sure how close I came to that I can say that there were over 500 miles on the clock when the warning light came on, I pulled into the service station and disaster struck.Apart from the sound effects, the Yaris is a delight to drive. Its handling, while not exactly that of a hot hatch, is up to anything the engine can throw at it, which isn't always the case with smaller turbo diesels, and although there is quite a lot of body movement when the terrain becomes bumpier than usual it all feels very well controlled.The light steering makes urban driving easy, as long as you can see where you're going. Forward visibility is acceptable, but thanks to bulky C-pillars the view to the rear is about average for a modern supermini, which is to say pretty ruddy awful.In some ways the second-generation Yaris, which went on sale at the start of 2006, is a grown-up version of the original. That's most obvious in the dashboard layout, which once again consists of digital readouts in a letterbox-sized compartment roughly at the centreline of the car.It sounds far more complicated than it is, and it also seems clearer to me than the similar system on the old Yaris. I always felt I was having to readjust my focus too much every time I glanced at the readouts. The only snag is that there are buttons on either side of it, for resetting the tripmeter and stuff like that, and the ones on the left are simply too far away. It would be an act of the gravest folly to try to reach them while driving.This is an oddly careless piece of design which comes as a surprise in what is generally a very well thought-out car. It doesn't feel as radical as the first Yaris did, and is more in the tradition of Toyotas that you buy and more or less forget about until it's time to trade them in for something else. But for all that it's a very effective supermini which is easy or fun to drive (depending on what you want to do with it) and remarkably spacious compared with many of its rivals. Engine 1364cc, 4 cylinders Power 89bhp Transmission 5-speed manual Fuel/CO2 62.8mpg / 119g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 10.7 seconds Top speed 109mph Price £11,760 Details correct at publication date
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