Toyota Camry 2.0 (A) Review

To understand what I´m talking about, I´d like to draw your attention to Japanese appliance maker Sanyo. Their home appliances are brilliantly reliable, effective, and they get the job done. Period. No one said anything about style, finesse, much less passion, for that matter.

Now try looking at the webpage of let´s say, Sony, or even Korea´s LG. Compare and contrast their product range. And then look at the Toyota Camry.

And if you still don´t get it, well, good for you. All you want in a car probably, is for it to start reliably every morning for ten years, have lots of space, and for it to ignore the abuse that your family throws at it. You also don´t gel your hair more than once a decade or care very much about your looks in general.

Because when we look at a Camry, we spot an uncomfortably designed car with plaid insides, huge amounts of space, and really not much else left to the imagination.

"So what keeps 'em coming?"

Looking at Toyota´s latest Camry facelift, we tried to answer that question, first by looking at what has been changed.

First - a new front bumper. There´s a little bit of an "X" shape going on at the front end of the Camry, supposedly done in order to give viewers an impression of sturdiness. In addition, that chromed grill has now grown and expanded nearly one and a half times the size of the pre-facelift model, if you could call it that.

Flanking the new grille are new headlamps that extend further towards the centre portion of the front. These new lights really do the trick and play a great part towards making the front profile appear slimmer and less awkward.

In an effort to perhaps distance the appearance of this Camry from that of the Japanese domestic model (JDM) variant brought in by parallel importers, the fog lamps appear to have been set further back into the bumper, and garnished with chrome surrounds.

Toyota has given this Camry a new colour option - Gray Metallic, or in layman´s terms, "black, but not so black." This, in addition to two different coats of metallic silver that otherwise follow our aforementioned sentiments.

Interior and equipment

Not much has changed here, with the exception of a few details. There´s a "Tomtom" centre device that incorporates satellite navigation, a reverse camera and DVD/radio functions. It was one of the best GPS´ that we have ever sampled, coming only second to the BMW OEM, VDO and Siemens versions in our opinion.

The "Optitron" meters are classier too. The band in between the numbers on the dials and the pivot point of the needles is now furnished in a classier grayish-black (see pictures) instead of the previously "cubed" design.
A feature that we feel is always worth highlighting would be the "plasmacluster" air-conditioning cleaner that works wonders, especially in dusty environments that we´ve taken the car to in the hunt for a good photo-shoot location.

It was among other niceties such as rear air-conditioning, a flat floor, a wide boot-loading space and a luggage net that really helped take things further when it mattered. And if your 6 foot tall basketballer gets the cramps, he´ll be able to adjust the front passenger´s seat forwards (incline included) using two buttons mounted on the right side of the backrest.

Driving Impressions

Not much has changed here, to be honest. There´s that 2.0-litre inline-four chugging an efficient 147 bhp at 6,000 rpm, as well as 190 Nm of torque at 4,000 rpm. It´s still a good unit, pulling strongly in a linear fashion from 3000 rpm onwards. There´s lots of power to be had all the way to the redline, and due to heavy insulation tactics, we ended up revving it more often that we should have.

But the emphasis here would be on driving refinement, instead of driving pleasure. It´s not a fun car to punt around. It feels big, there´s lots of bodyroll, albeit well-controlled, and the brakes are rather unpredictable when you upset the car´s natural balance, which on hindsight, is quite easy to do.

But like we mentioned, it does have a brilliant, quiet engine, save for a distant mechanical whine that sounded more like a seriously muffled supercharger. The same goes for all of its body panels. We´re not kidding when we say that the Camry surpasses the noise, vibration and harshness levels of the Lexus IS250. It´s quieter, possibly due to the smaller wheel size used, and more refined at speeds above 100 km/h.

Wind noise? Absent. Rain? We hardly noticed if not for raindrops falling on our windscreen. Road noise? Barely. All we heard was a distant, minute hum from below. The Camry is one of those cars that inspires fear for your level of wakefulness when driving home after a tiring day of work.

It´s also worth mentioning that we returned a respectable fuel consumption figure of 11 kilometres to the litre over a distance of 300 km on a combined driving style, redlining the engine once out of three traffic light starts.

Would you buy one?

And so, we may argue with the blandness of it all, but at the end of the day, we don´t think any of you would care because after all, there is that Toyota reputation for reliability, assuming you want an appliance requiring as little effort as possible to drive.

While the 2010 Camry continues this trend, we can´t say that it has changed so as to attract "that target market" of customers who want more out of their car than just a quiet, refined ride and nothing else. Perhaps Singapore´s aging population might help bolster the trend, but we do worry for this car´s future, and like many others, we expect quite a major change in tactics for Toyota´s next Camry.