our eggplant purple toyota spade is the best car we've owned
At the tail end of 2025 Soolagna and I were in the market for a new car. For cars in our budget we were mostly finding uninspiring and boring ex-fleet options, sure they were practical but we really wanted something we were excited about so we'd actually be motivated to look after it.
We widened our search with Soolagna's truly inspired search criteria of colour=purple and stumbled across this Japanese import 2015 Toyota Spade. It immediately caught our eye but we honestly had no idea what we were looking at. It didn't look like any car we'd seen in our searches and it was hard to tell how big it actually was. But the snub nosed small van became a bit of a fixation for us.
We did our research, became obsessed with the idea of a hatch back sized car with a sliding door and within the week we'd test driven it and purchased it.
Now having owned the car for nearly 6 months we are both convinced this is the perfect class of car. The Mini MPV class is really common in Asia but not so much in the west outside of some oddities like the Nissan Cube or the PT Cruiser but neither of those cars embrace the full utility of the form factor.
Low to the ground, spacious interior, sliding door, storage for days (including a handy little basket behind the steering wheel) and just a delight to look at.
The perfect car.
