Toyota Innova HycrossInnova HyCross

What to know about the Innova Hycross

The Innova name has spent two decades as the default answer to a specific Indian question: how do you carry seven people, a driver who wants dignity, and their luggage, without buying something that drives like a bus? The Hycross answers it with a unibody platform, a 1.8-litre petrol hybrid whose engine makes 122 bhp but whose combined system output is closer to 184 bhp, and a cabin built around the second row rather than the first. The strong hybrid version is the one to understand: it slips into electric creep at junctions, returns a claimed 28 kmpl in the sort of traffic that makes conventional MPVs drink, and never asks you to find a charging point.

The packaging is clever in ways that only emerge on a real family trip. The third row folds into the floor rather than sitting in a well, so the boot is flat and usable in five-seat form; the second-row captain’s chairs on top variants recline and slide; and the car, for all its 4.75 metres of length, is low enough to enter a basement ramp without ceremony. Toyota Safety Sense on the higher variants brings adaptive cruise and automatic emergency braking, and the structure carries a five-star score with seven airbags.

Nothing comes free at this price. The petrol-only version, with the same CVT and less torque courtesy of the missing motor, is the noticeable slack end of the range; the boot with all seven seats up is small once the folding mechanism takes its share; and the CVT, for all its city smoothness, still ties the engine to the throttle under a hard climb. But as a car in which a family stops negotiating with the road, the Hycross makes the strongest case in this catalogue.

• Claimed 28 kmpl from the strong hybrid
• Three rows that fold flat, seven real seats
• Toyota Safety Sense and seven airbags