Just how good is the Toyota's high-output 1.8-liter engine? Good enough to be the engine of choice for one of the world's

To put the XRS engine's performance into perspective, its 1.8-liter powerplant is the same engine as used in one of the world's ultimate street cars, the Lotus Elise. (Photo: Trevor Hofmann, Canadian Auto Press)

ultimate street cars, the Lotus Elise. Lotus chose the engine because of its out-of-the-box performance, superb reliability, global emissions rating, and flexibility to tuning. So if it's good enough for Lotus, it'll serve Corolla buyers very well indeed. Bringing the XRS down from unmentionable speeds are the 4-wheel disc brakes I mentioned previously, mastered by a 4-sensor ABS system and Electronic Brake force Distribution (EBD) as standard equipment. They are pretty well fade resistant, a fact I learned from excessive braking during the 20 or so laps I took around the autocross course in the afternoon. We were still running it when the "marshals" were taking down the cones, forcing us to make up our own track on the half of the parking lot that was still set up. Too much fun!

Yeah, that's how I'd sum up Toyota's new Corolla XRS. It's over-the-top good times in a sensible sedan. It would be fairly

With all these powerful and fun goodies packed into a sensible sedan, who could resist? (Photo: Trevor Hofmann, Canadian Auto Press)

easy to convince your significant other that you want to buy a "Corolla" (don't add the letters XRS during pragmatic reasoning conversations) for its practical 5-seat capacity, full load of standard safety features or 38 year history of reliable service. But really, behind the sincere smile would be an all-knowing guilty grin. But rather than coaxing your partner, maybe you just need to talk yourself into it. If that's the case you can woo the hedonistic half of your personality with the car's standard air conditioning with clean-air filtration, power windows, power door locks with keyless entry, power glass sunroof with sunshade, cruise control, illuminated entry, leather wrapped steering wheel and shift knob, Optitron gauges, silver interior accents, exclusive very comfortable and supportive sport seats, and a tire pressure monitoring system.