Toyota RAV4 Restyled for 2019

The RAV4 crossover SUV is Toyota's best-selling vehicle in the United States.  Recently its fifth-generation version was introduced.  (For information regarding all RAV4 generations, link here.)

I own a fourth-generation RAV4 and am pleased with it.  Aside from front-end fussiness, its styling is pleasant.  Since mine is five years old, I was thinking of replacing it when redesigned 2019 models would be introduced.

Now that the 2019s are here, I'm not at all sure I want to buy a new RAV4.   That's because of the styling.  As I've mentioned a number of times here, automobile stylists nowadays are greatly constrained because they have to deal with overall body shapes dictated by wind tunnel tests.  To a considerable extent, they are simply decorating those shapes, whereas stylists of yore (say, the 1950s) were able to design shapes along with the ornamentation.

For many years Toyota cars featured rather bland styling and received increasing criticism from various sources for that.  A few years ago Akio Toyoda, the firm's president and member of the founding family decreed that Toyota cars get flashy styling.  The result was a shift from bland looking vehicles to garishly decorated ones.  And the new 2019 RAV4 has joined this sad design fraternity.

In the Gallery below I pair the facelifted (from 2013) 2016 RAV4 with the 2019 model.

Gallery

The 2016 RAV4.  The frontal design is aggressive, perhaps needlessly so.

The 2019 front is more of a flat, bulldog snout.  Thematically it's more coherent than the '16's in that the shape of the lower grille opening is echoed by the outline of the panel above it.  Also, the cliché sweep from headlight-to-headlight on the '16 is downplayed.  All that said, the '19 front strikes me as being out of character for RAV4s.  (Yes, there is a 2019 version kitted out as more of a recreational vehicle, so I suppose the styling staff was asked to create a truck-like front.)

The 2013/2016 side could have used a less-soft front, but the rest of the design is reasonably taut and well-balanced.

The character of the '19's side is far from the '16's.  Wheel openings are squared off, the aft has a totally new theme, and the rest of the side is cluttered with near-random sculpting.  Typical current Toyota overkill.

The previous RAV4's aft featured clichéd tail light assembly shaping that was poorly integrated with the rest of the design.  The overall rear configuration for RAV4's since 2006 was tall and narrow -- the styling made no serious attempt to camouflage this.

From this photo, the aft of the new RAV4 seems physically wider than previous RAVs.  Tail light assembly shapes relate better to the other design features.  These are fairly well done, having strong horizontal elements instead of the current cliché of having "swooped" sculpting.  The fussy element here is the sculpting in the zone between the rear wheel openings and the central panel where the license plate resides.

To me, the silliest, most unnecessary detail is that black strip which continues the backlight roof overhang to side window outline, running almost arbitrarily across the C-pillar.  How did this detail ever get approved?  This little joke is a design-killer, so far as I'm concerned.  I'll go shopping for a Honda CR-V even though I'll admit that the new RAV4 looks better in the showroom than it does in these photos..