Spent an entire day being driven around in a Hycross: 11 Observations

The driver did confirm that the throttle response was very slow and flat on the HyCross GX as compared to the Crysta.

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Last week, I was provided a taxi through my office Corporate Taxi Service run by ORIX, since I had meetings throughout the day in multiple parts of the city. Lo and behold, the taxi that turned up to pick me up from home turned out to be an Innova Hycross GX!

My observations after being driven around for a day in the car are below. I primarily occupied the rear left seat in the seven-seater configuration.

1. Very comfortable rear seat, the GX does not have the battery bump under the front passenger seat, so it was even better than the Hybrid one I checked some time ago as far as foot room is concerned.
2. The headroom, knee room and elbow room are all excellent. The thigh support was satisfactory as well. The seat cushioning is not too hard, not too soft - Goldilocks!
3. The ride was supple and absorbent. The vehicle was new and the driver was slowing down to the slowest of crawls every time there was a pothole or speed breaker, so I could not judge how the car would behave when going over them at speed, but at slow speeds, it was very steady and I could hardly notice the road surface undulations.
4. The NVH levels are awesome, the engine is absolutely noiseless and external noise is also kept out very well.
5. The AC is quite powerful and chills the cabin quickly.
6. As it has become a norm in all three generations of Innovas, the rearmost AC vents meant for the third row are more powerful than the vents meant for the middle row. I had my seat pushed back all the way and reclined at a pretty steep angle at one point, as I wanted to catch a nap on a longer cross-city ride. This caused the cold air from the last row vent to hit my ear directly. Even after I closed that vent and kept the middle row vent fully open, the air continued to flow and hit my ear, as a design the vent (in all three generations of Innovas) is somewhat flimsy, and it doesn't quite close down the airflow, even when you close the vent fully. A fair amount of air continues to leak through at a considerable speed! This was somewhat irritating, as I had to then make my seat more erect, so as to escape the blast from the vent.
7. The armrests could have been wider, they were a tad narrow to comfortably rest one's arm.
8. The tray table in the middle could have been made of better plastics, as with the rest of the car, the plastic quality is very poor, especially given this is a GX.
9. The car seems to just creep forward imperceptibly, and provide zero sense of acceleration at any time. Even when I urged the driver to go a bit faster as I was getting late for a meeting, the car just simply would not give any impression that it was accelerating, even when the driver was supposedly trying to go faster. I was not driving, so it could be just that the driver was babying the gas pedal but it never felt like it was accelerating even a little bit. The pace brought back memories of being driven in my Uncle's Ambassador as a kid in the late 80s - speed changes happened at a snail's pace and one had to watch the speedometer intently to see if the car was going any faster.
10. The driver did confirm that the throttle response was very slow and flat on the HyCross GX as compared to the Crysta he used to drive before. Apparently, the rental company also has some Hybrid VX HyCrosses and he said those did accelerate a lot better than the NA petrol GX when he got a chance to drive them. The driver was almost apologetic that he wasn't going faster, although I was asking him to!
11. If one wants to have a very smooth and a very slow city drive, and not splurge on the car, the GX variant seems to be the ideal fit. This car simply cannot be hustled and the passengers will never feel any jerky acceleration or even any acceleration.

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