Headlights cannot be turned off
Cars in Canada are required to have day-running lights that never turn off. This is what the car will run if the knob is set to off. 1 click turns on the parking lights, just like every other car. 1 more click turns on the headlights, just like ever other car. Once the night time headlights are on and car is running, they cannot be turned off until the car is turned off. If I get some drive through mcdonalds at night then eat in my car, I'm blinding the shit out of everyone who drives by because I can't turn the lights off. If I stop on your driveway and I'm waiting for you, my headlights are shining into your living room and I can't turn them off. If I'm parked at a slight upward angle and my headlights are shining directly into the eyes of incoming drivers, I can't turn them off unless I turn the engine off.
Traction control cannot be turned off
Traction control is generally a nice feature and I'm really glad this car has it. The problem is that I can't toggle it off. There's a button to temporarily disable it, but it turns itself on again once the car moves faster than ~30mph. This is bad because the car has much better acceleration when the traction control is turned off. Without traction control, the snow tires spin and throw a bunch of snow around, but the car still accelerates quickly. With traction control, the computer aggressively cuts power and the acceleration is horrible as a result. Traction control is mostly a feature to prevent getting stuck and it does almost nothing useful once the car is moving, so it seems very odd that it would be a toggle-off rather than toggle-on button.
The cruise control sucks
My last compact cars were a Honda Civic and a Ford Tempo. The Tempo had a cable driven accelerator, and I could feel the pedal go right to the floor when the cruise control tried to maintain speed. It usually didn't work too well since that Tempo had less power than a bicycle, but at least it tried its best. My Civic would also go wide open throttle to maintain speed, and it could usually pull it off because it had a lot more power than the Tempo. That Civic could maintain cruise on a relatively steep hill in fifth gear. Cruise in the Corolla is just pathetic. It doesn't even try. Rather than keep it in 4th gear (top gear) and floor it, the cruise control will drop to third then rev up to 4000 just to get up the most pathetic hill imaginable. It makes the ride a lot jerkier when the cruise is constantly jumping between third and fourth gear because it won't open the throttle enough. I've driven the manual transmission version of this car, and I know for a fact that it could easily stay in top gear and maintain speed, but for some reason the automatic loves to fuck around.
Terrible highway performance
The maximum speed my brother and I could get this car up to was 108mph, and the acceleration is slow enough that passing a car driving 60mph is a considerable challenge. It takes long enough that it's a bit scary. Comparatively, my 2006 Honda Civic had a top of speed of 125mph (it would govern itself at that speed), could easily pass cars on the highway, and got the same gas mileage while doing so.
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