Thursday, July 26, 2018

Toyota's Slowly-Growing Camry

Toyota's XV series, marketed as the Camry, has been a best-selling "standard" sedan in the USA for many years now.  And over time, those cars have become larger.  This is nothing new: for instance, I traced the growth of the Honda Civic here.

Another change has been Camry's styling.  Originally, it was uncomplicated and pleasing.  More recently, following Toyota's new styling direction, it has been jazzed up as a faux- racing competition car.

As an aside, I never paid much attention to Camrys until at some point in the mid-1990s I happened to rent one in Cleveland for a combination professional meeting and sales trip.  My Camry was impressively peppy both around town and on freeways.  For several days I wondered what kind of motor it had, halfway suspecting there were six cylinders under the hood.  The day I was to return the Camry to the car rental folks I pulled into a parking lot and popped open the hood.  I counted electrical leads to cylinders and came up with only four.  So it seemed that Toyota's multi-valve motor made a simple four-cylinder car perform much better than the others I'd driven over the years.  I was impressed.

Gallery

1992 - 1996
Wheelbase is 103 inches (2620 mm).  This is the first of what the Wikipedia link above calls the "wide-body" Camrys.  Styling is that of a rounded-off "three-box" package typical of the 1970s and early '80s.  The rounded edges might have been the result of wind-tunnel testing or simply might have been a gesture to aerodynamically-influenced designs elsewhere that began to appear in the mid-1980s.

1997 - 2001
Wheelbase is 105.1 inches (2670 mm).  This generation Camry is a styling transition to later generations that tended to have similar design characteristics.  Its general appearance is of the "soft" school of aerodynamic styling featuring few sharp, straight, angular details.

2002 - 2006
Wheelbase is 107.1 inches (2720 mm).  Now the Camry has a more crisp look that I find difficult to criticize.  It's not exciting or gorgeous, nor it it likely to ever be considered a design classic.  It's just very competently done.  Do note the doors and their windows -- later Camrys will have very similar ones.

2007 - 2011
Wheelbase is 109.3 inches (2776 mm).  Although given a different XV number, this generation Camry has doors and side windows that seem the almost the same as those seen in the previous image.  (Aft door cut lines seem identical.)  The rear is more rounded, but the frontal details are close to those that appeared for 2002.

2012 - 2017
Wheelbase is 109.3 inches (2775 mm).  This Camry has the same wheelbase as the previous version.  Again, there is great similarity in the doors and windows, though they are not exactly the same.  The roof profile is slightly different.

2018 -
Wheelbase is now 11.2 inches (2820 mm).  And the doors and side windows differ from the 2002-2017 style.  The overall design is tending towards fussy ugliness.

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