My 2006 Yaris (Carpento)

[Carpento]

Let me show my Yaris as well

I bought my Yaris in february this year. I had to find a new car as my previous one (a '99 Subaru Impreza Plus, with the N/A 1.6 liter boxer) turned out to be worn out in many aspects. The very honest specialist mechanic advised me not to invest any single euro into it. Well, I took his advice for granted and started searching for a successor. After some comparisons between different cars I went looking for a 2006(-ish) Corolla. However, the second hand car dealership where I had bought all my cars so far did not have any Corolla available at that moment. I know the owner quite well and after some casual talking he asked me if I would like to test drive the 2006 Yaris he had received in shortly before.

After some persuasion I made a test drive and was pretty surprised how well that little car drove. The rest of the story is easily guessed

When I bought my Yaris it was on 17" alloys, in matte black. Given the fact that I almost never like black alloys, especially not when they are quite on the large side, I knew what step to take first: find decent rims. From my previous car I had 4 Vredestein Quatrac all-season tires in 205/50 R16 left over (only a year old, no more than 15k kilometers driven). So the challenge turned out to be: find nice rims which are 6J wide and fit the hub size and bolt pattern of the Yaris. That was easier said than done. Anything I was able to find which came from a Yaris only was 5J or 5,5J wide. Shopping at the larger models of Toyota did not help much either: most of them have a 5x100 bolt pattern.

I was greatly helped by somebody on a Dutch internet forum (not primarily about cars) who bought a rusty 2003 Corolla T-Sport to swap that engine to his MR2 project. The body and other parts went for sale and that way I got hold of five fairly immaculate 16" rims which fit the Yaris perfectly. Needless to say that those provide a more comfortable ride and I like the looks a lot more.

After that first upgrade (or maybe downgrade, depends on your opinion) I went on to the next tiny issue which bothered me. The gear knob of the Yaris tends to wear out. The paint rubs off after some use and the than uncovered plastic yellows incredibly fast. Super ugly but the most gear knobs I was able to find on scrap yards faced the same issue. I think that has to do with the fact that Yarises are most used for city traffic, involving frequent gear changes, and therefore heavier wear on the gear knob. Luckily I found a decent gear knob of a crashed Avensis. That has a dark grey color but I like that even more, it matches perfectly with the heater controls in my car. And it fits in without an issue.

With the rims of a Corolla and the gear knob of an Avensis I spotted some trend: mounting parts of other Toyota models I continued that trend by swapping the wiper stalk for one of a second generation Prius (to add the dial to set the wiping interval).

The car dealership where I bought my car had an anniversary which was celebrated with an open day for all customers, complete with some demonstrations. One of that was a demo of spot repair being done. For that demo customers could sign in to have little dents fixed for free (for the sake of having something to show, obviously). I took part with my Yaris and therefore got rid of a nasty dent in the hood and some parking damage in the left passenger door. For free, so needless to say I was happy enough with that.

The most recent upgrades had to do with the audio system. The integrated audio is pretty OK in terms of sound quality but lacked a carkit, no modern media storage, and so on. After some searching I went for a Sony XAV-AX5650 head unit.

But never be satisfied too early. My Yaris steering wheel lacked the controls for voice and calls. No wonder, as the original head unit did not have those functionality at all. I could have swapped the wheel with one out of a Yaris which actually had the controls on the right side too but those wheels are quite rare and (after some research) I went a different route. How about the wheel of an Auris, with 9 buttons in total.

Next challenge: find an Auris wheel with all the controls (in the Netherlands lots of Auris were delivered without phone controls as well) including an intact airbag. That's the tough part: it seems in the Netherlands Toyotas only get to the scrap yard when totaled. And totaled cars most often have their airbags popped out, unsurprisingly. Nevertheless, I managed to find one and that appeared to be a perfect fit. With the Sony head unit steering wheel control is easy to get working. You can assign the buttons to the functions of the radio super easy so that saved me a lot of headache. Only thing was that the DISP-button did not respond. After some investigation I understood why. That button is strictly seen not for audio control. It therefore connects to a different wire in the loom. That particular wire is not connected in the Yaris so I took out the soldering iron and a 2ct resistor to connect it to the available wires. After that the DISP-button was working with the head unit nicely. (I assigned it to 'Source select' however).

Latest addition is a reverse camera, which is connected to the head unit. I took the extra mile and added a three way switch to be able to activate the camera manually, shut it down completely or have it being switched by the reverse light. Furthermore I added a tiny PCB with a delayed relay. This keeps the camera on for a few seconds even if the reverse light already is off. Very useful when you need to manoeuvre a few times. I think I will replace the camera with a better one shortly. Mainly because of the current viewing angle being a little too tight and night performance being somewhat poor. On the well known Chinese sites I already saw some examples of cameras integrated in the rear plate lighting assembly. That looks nice to me, so I think that will be the first next upgrade.

In the future I would really like to have cruise control installed but with the European ECU that's not as easy as it is with the US ECU, unfortunately. Maybe I will use an aftermarket set but modify it to use the original Toyota stalk, to keep the looks (somewhat) OEM, as far as that is possible after all my part swaps :P