Displaying Items By Tag: Camry

The 2021 Toyota Camry is not the drab beige appliance you might remember. This generation set a unique tone from the very beginning with its significantly enhanced driver involvement, interior quality and overall style. Toyota has steadily been updating it, too. Last year Toyota added an all-wheel drive option as well as a high-performance Camry TRD, which is also the most affordable way to get a Camry with a V6. This year brings more trim selection for the hybrid, along with updated infotainment and safety features

Despite being fundamentally different than the Camrys that came before, the 2021 should still satisfy the sensible buying criteria that's made it a best-seller for so long: strong reliability, good resale value and high safety ratings. So, while much has changed, much has also stayed the same. That's a good thing, and even if the Honda Accord is broadly more appealing, the Hyundai Sonata more distinctive and Mazda6 more fun to drive, the diverse, well-rounded Camry lineup is a must-consider.

The Honda Civic Type R and Toyota Camry TRD are not rivals by any stretch of the imagination, yet they have one thing in common: they both happen to cost around 40 grand.

Unveiled earlier this year and expected to enter production this month, the 2021 Toyota Camry brings a few upgrades for the new model year and small visual revisions that help set the trim levels apart.

The 2021 Toyota Camry gains both visual and technology improvements in the new model year. It's not a full-fledged mid-cycle update, but the changes are welcome nonetheless.

Toyota added an XSE grade to the Hybrid trim to start. This brings the sportier suspension tuning and aggressive appearance package to the greenest of models. It's pictured in gray here, and if not for the blue Toyota logo and Hybrid badge, we'd never assume this model was the eco-focused one. It looks just like the XSE grade for the standard Camry, which gets an even bolder honeycomb style grille this year. If boring, hybrid-car looks were keeping you from going Camry Hybrid, Toyota appears to have a solution for that now.

In recent years, I've put a lot of work into finding junkyard examples of vehicles from final model years (either for the model or the manufacturer itself). We just saw one of the very last Pontiacs ever sold, for example, and I managed to locate one of the Final 500 Oldsmobiles as well. The first year of a car that went on to great fame and fortune seems like a happier story in these unhappy times, though, and so here's one of the first examples of the Toyota Camry ever sold on this side of the Pacific.

It's not every day that you see a legitimate NASCAR racer hit the used car market, but that's exactly what we have here.

With the Camry’s 2021 model year, Toyota is celebrating the nameplate’s largest and most diverse lineup ever, which will now feature a new XSE Hybrid grade.

Reducing the weight of a car is one of the most overlooked ways to improve performance.

The 2020 Toyota Camry is unlike any that have come before. True, this generation set a unique tone from the very beginning with its significantly enhanced driver involvement, interior quality and overall style. However, the 2020 model goes even further by offering greater variety than ever. The addition of all-wheel drive satisfies requests by customers and dealers alike for a more all-weather-ready Camry. Then there's the new high-performance Camry, the TRD – it's highly unlikely anyone was clamoring for that, but if the goal was to show that a Camry can get the blood flowing, well, mission accomplished.

Now, in many other ways, the Camry is also like its predecessors – it's reliable, holds onto its value well and is very safe. So, while much has changed, much has also stayed the same. That's a good thing, and even if the Honda Accord is broadly more appealing, the Hyundai Sonata more distinctive and Mazda6 more fun to drive, the diverse Camry lineup is a must-consider.

For 2020, Toyota Camry customers have the new option of all-wheel drive when considering exactly what version of the popular sedan to buy. The extra two wheels of propulsion are available with the 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine on LE, SE, XLE, XSE, and Nightshade trims. No matter which trim is selected, all-wheel drive will be a $1,400 upcharge.

Autoblog's James Riswick tested and reviewed both the 2020 Camry AWD and the 2021 Toyota Avalon AWD sedans earlier this month, but at the time, Toyota had not announced just how much the feature would cost. The current-generation Camry launched for the 2018 model year, but this is the first year all-wheel drive has been offered, a corporate switch largely prompted by consumer demand. 

Toyota recently launched a number of all-wheel drive Camry and Avalon models in the U.S. market and Redline Reviews had the opportunity to test out the two on a prepped snow course and on the road.

PARK CITY, Utah – The next-generation Camry was in the bag, on-sale, and receiving positive reviews. High-fives, team. The new car was wildly improved, having adopted Toyota's new TNGA-K platform that would go on to proliferate throughout the lineup, including the all-wheel-drive RAV4 and Highlander. But the new Camry, like every predecessor since 1991, would be front-wheel drive only. That there is a 2020 Toyota Camry AWD shows that something quickly changed.

All-wheel drive had been considered during the development of the new Camry, but was nixed. One gets the impression it was a decision made in Japan. Then the car launched, and almost immediately a vocal group of North American customers and dealers started asking why all-wheel drive wasn't offered and could it be added. This coincided with a continued mass exodus from family sedans to family compact crossovers, at least in part because of the reassurance all-wheel drive provides (even if a good set of tires should functionally do the trick). Toyota of North America made the decision to quickly change course, to offer all-wheel drive on the Camry, and put its own engineers in Michigan to work.

To create the 2020 Camry AWD, those engineers needed to rework almost the entire floor pan to accommodate a prop shaft and rear axle. The only engine paired with all-wheel drive would be the 2.5-liter four-cylinder, which in this application produces 202 horsepower and 182 pound-feet of torque (205 hp and 185 lb-ft in the XSE trim). Besides it being the sole gas-only engine offered by its AWD donor, the RAV4, only 6% of Camrys sold pack the optional V6. On paper, that 2.5-liter would seem to be the same in the Camry and RAV4, but they are in fact different in tiny ways, and it's the RAV4 unit that finds itself in the Camry AWD. The minuscule output difference between the standard Camry (203 hp and 184 lb-ft in all trims but its own XSE) and the Camry AWD is actually the result of a slight restriction in the exhaust caused by the need to package extra hardware at the rear.

The engine is joined by the RAV's eight-speed automatic transmission, which possesses the required output for the prop shaft needed to power the rear wheels. That piece of hardware actually comes from the Highlander, but the rear axle and multi-link rear suspension are modified from the RAV4. To accommodate all of the above, an electronic parking brake was fitted and a new gas tank was created in a saddle design that arches over the prop shaft. To ensure there was enough room for the new tank, engineers turned to the Camry Hybrid's back seat, which is 10 mm higher to accommodate its battery pack. Trunk space remains the same.

Nobody expected a 2020 Toyota Camry TRD model before Toyota announced both this sporty sedan and the Avalon TRD at the same time. And even after that, we had a hard time believing that the Camry and Avalon TRD versions would be legitimately compelling drivers. However, the Avalon TRD managed to win some of us over with its surprisingly agile driving dynamics and aggressive design. We were hoping for the same to happen in our week with the smaller and inherently sportier Camry TRD.

The formula for the Camry is similar to the Avalon. Add suspension, sound and styling; keep the powertrain. Toyota calls the Camry TRD's chassis "track tuned." New, stiffer coil springs lower the ride height by 0.6 inch. Combined with more aggressive sway bars and TRD-specific shocks, Toyota says the roll stiffness is increased by 44 percent in front and 67 percent in the rear. Our tester didn't have the Bridgestone Potenza summer tires that come as standard equipment, due to it being cold and snowy in Michigan right now, but the all-season Michelins it did have were mounted to the special 19-inch matte black TRD wheels. Toyota also mounts larger front brakes on the TRD, moving from 12-inch front rotors to 12.9-inch discs, and two-piston calipers as opposed to single-piston clampers. As we foreshadowed before, the Camry keeps its 3.5-liter V6 that makes 301 horsepower and 267 pound-feet of torque. Even the eight-speed automatic's transmission tuning carries over to the TRD.