2025 Toyota Corolla FX First Test: Looks Sportier Than It Drives
The black accents don’t improve performance, but with an as-tested price of less than $30,000, you may not care.
Pros
- $27,785 base MSRP
- Cool black accents
- Bigger, more readable screen
Cons
- Not particularly quick
- Engine drones
- Dated cabin
For those deep within Toyota Corolla lore, let us set your expectations right off the bat: The 2025 Toyota Corolla FX is not a spiritual successor to the 1987 Corolla FX16. There’s no tuned motor or anything exciting like that. Instead, Toyota wants you to think of this special edition Corolla as an “homage.” But what amounts to an appearance package doesn’t detract from the Corolla’s good bones, old as they’re getting.
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Provided you don’t plan to do much hard driving, the Corolla FX is a spritely and fun enough little car.
Familiar Turf
The FX takes the Corolla SE grade and gives it a handful of blacked-out details, including the roof, mirror caps, badging, wheels, and lug nuts. The rear spoiler is also a bit more dramatic. Inside, a dual-tone cloth interior is accented by fun orange stitching.
The cabin is where you’ll find the 2025 Corolla FX’s headline item: the larger 10.5-inch infotainment screen as standard, which is a significant size up from the 8.0-inch screen that used to be the model’s only option.
In practice, the bigger screen is easier to read, but using Apple CarPlay dominates the entire thing. You have to tap an extra icon or two to navigate back to the Toyota apps. But physical climate controls remain, as do volume up/down buttons, and you’ll never find us complaining about that.
The familiar 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine is here, good for a claimed 169 hp and 151 lb-ft of torque. That’s all sent to the front wheels via a CVT, an automatic transmission type that can cause the engine to loudly drone. MotorTrend testing clocked the feathery 3,070-pound sedan to hit 60 mph in 8.1 seconds and the quarter mile in 16.3 seconds at 87.4 mph.
While it can feel a bit quicker than it is, you’ll not get the raciness this Corolla’s design suggests. However, the car is a pretty tidy stopper, with short pedal travel and little dive; it needed 125 feet to stop from 60 mph.
As a commuter, and especially an urban one, the Corolla’s minute footprint works in its favor. It fits basically everywhere and makes enough power to merge, pass, and otherwise glide into gaps in traffic. You’ll hear the engine work when you do, but it’ll get you there.
Yet somehow, nestled in that spritely chassis with its athletic-feeling suspension, and without a whole lot of body roll, you won’t mind it. Eventually, the engine drone fades down to white noise to accompany the tires’ hum on the highway.
The seats are supportive, and the ride is comfortable; the Corolla is happy to put in the miles. Over the course of our weeklong loan, the car returned 33 mpg combined, which is on par with the EPA’s 34-mpg estimate.
The FX does show its economy-car DNA in expected places, such as how the manual cloth seats are not heated and the leather-wrapped, non-heated steering wheel can be a little cold to the touch on chilly mornings. The back seats lack climate vents but are outfitted with two USB-C ports.
The rear seats are also snug in the headroom department, and this is from your humble writer who stands a mighty 63 inches tall. The trunk is deep but not particularly wide. Put bluntly, the Corolla sedan is best suited for one- or two-person households who seldom use the back seat for other people.
