VELL PLAYED

The gargantuan Toyota Vellfire may not be a looker, but all is forgiven and forgotten once you clamber into its sumptuous cabin

- Pablo Chaterji

Before I begin my review, a meditation on Japanese car names. Essentially, I don’t understand them, but I enjoy hearing them very much indeed, because some of them sound like they were coined by putting random word generators and pre-schoolers in a room and letting them run wild. Take the Mazda Bongo Friendee, for example, or the Suzuki Every Joypop Turbo, or — and this one takes the entire bakery — the Honda That’s. Yes, Honda once decided to name one of its models as if it had forgotten what it had originally wanted to say. You had no option other than to applaud the sheer insouciance displayed by these manufacturers, because clearly they didn’t care a hoot about what the rest of the world thought about those names. Tragically, they just don’t name them like they used to any more, in Japan.

They do, however, have names like Alphard and Vellfire, which are relevant to this article, because Toyota makes both vehicles. To be fair, Alphard is the brightest star in the Hydra constellation, so it’s an actual thing. Vellfire, on the other hand, apparently means ‘velvet on fire’, which... well, never mind. The Vellfire has been an offshoot of the Alphard van since 2008, when two design variants were launched, each with its own distribution channel and stated USP; here in India, where we will see only the Vellfire, that USP is clearly ‘Luxurious, bro.’ More on that later, though.