Toyota Aygo interior, tech and practicality

Passenger comfort in the front of the Toyota Aygo is reasonably good. The cabin feels airy thanks to large side windows and there’s just enough seat adjustment to accommodate taller occupants up front. The front seats have some bolstering on the side to hold you in place, but there’s no adjustable lumbar support and we miss the colourful cloth upholstery you’ll find in the Aygo’s siblings – the Citroen C1 and Peugeot 108.

Once you’ve familiarised yourself with the infotainment and dashboard controls, you’ll find all the functions are fairly simple to operate, with physical knobs and buttons for climate settings. The touchscreen sits within your eyeline and responds reasonably quickly to inputs, making it one of the better setups in this class.

Your view out of the Aygo is pretty good. The windscreen and side windows are large, and the car’s overall dimensions are very small, so it’s easy to gauge where your bumpers end. Over-the-shoulder visibility is – like every hatchback – somewhat blocked by a thicker rear pillar, but that’s the price you pay for rollover protection. We wish the rear window extended a little further down, but all Aygos with an infotainment screen include a reversing camera, which mostly silences those complaints.

Toyota dropped the entry-level X trim from the lineup in 2020. This was quite barren with just a stereo and electric front windows coming as standard.

X-Play is next up and adds air conditioning, Bluetooth and DAB radio. From 2019, this trim gained a seven-inch touchscreen infotainment system with a reversing camera. From 2020, this setup included Apple CarPlay and Android Auto as standard, while also adding automatic emergency braking and lane-departure warning.

X-Trend models sit in the middle of the range and gain 15-inch alloy wheels, automatic climate control, auto headlights and front foglights. Before it became standard in 2020, this trim was the point at which Apple CarPlay and Android Auto were added to the infotainment system.

X-Clusiv sits at the top of the Aygo range. You'll find most cars in this trim have a contrast-coloured roof and snazzy multi-spoke alloy wheels, plus part-leather upholstery inside.

Several special editions such as the brightly coloured X-Cite and orange JBL cars have been offered through the Aygo’s lifecycle. These are worth seeking out because they usually have a good standard level of equipment and funky, unique paint and upholstery finishes.

There’s just one infotainment setup available in the Aygo – a seven-inch touchscreen that sits in the middle of the dashboard pod. This became standard on X-Play models in 2019 and, with basic X cars taken off sale in 2020, is now the only setup on all newer Aygos.

It’s mostly simple to operate and, thanks to reasonably quick responses, isn’t too hard to use while on the move. There aren’t physical shortcut buttons to jump between functions, sadly, but you do get a proper volume knob as well as a home button that makes it fairly simple to get back to square one.

Built-in nav is available, but you’ll be much better off using your own mapping apps through Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. These functions were only available on range-topping Aygos for 2019, but became standard across the lineup in 2020.

Space in the back isn’t among the Aygo’s strengths. You can feasibly squeeze a pair of adults on the rear bench, but even medium-height passengers will find their heads brushing the roof. You can easily lose what little rear legroom there is if you have anyone over six-foot tall sat up front – something the Volkswagen Up and Hyundai i10 are both better at.

The door panels, like the front seats, also intrude slightly into shoulder room, making accommodation back there less comfortable than almost all rivals. At least entry isn’t too hard thanks to almost all recent Aygo models coming in five-door form only.

There are a pair of Isofix points in the back but the same issues that compromise access for adult passengers are multiplied if you’re trying to fit bulky child seats back there. You’ll have very little room to position anything behind a front-seat passenger and must stoop quite far to avoid banging your head on the door frame.

There’s not much good news in the boot, either. You get just 168 litres of space up to the parcel shelf. The space is as square as you could reasonably expect, but lacks the impressive depth of the Volkswagen Up or the sheer capacity of the Hyundai i10.

You access the boot solely by opening the rear window glass, rather than in concert with a metal boot lid. That means the opening itself is super-light to lift, but is rounder than we’d like and leaves a high lip, making it hard to lift heavy objects into the boot.