People’s Choice Returns With Apps and Adele

Driving a Camry is akin to eating at a chain restaurant, drinking a Bud Light and watching the latest summer blockbuster. Sometimes you simply want to put your money on the known quantity without thinking too much about it.

And yet, just as beer snobs will try to foist their home-brew upon the contented light-beer drinker, I feel the quixotic urge to enlighten the Camry-driving masses to their more flavorful options.

People, have you seen the new Ford Fusion? It looks like an Aston Martin. How about a Kia Optima with a turbocharged engine and a 100,000-mile powertrain warranty? Are you aware of the Volkswagen Passat diesel? Off the top of my head, all three cars are more intriguing than the Camry. And yet, if there are so many other interesting choices, why is the Camry such a consistent sales monster?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is that the Camry excels at providing a soothing luxury experience for a moderate price. In fact, Toyota ruthlessly dropped prices for the redesigned 2012 models. The top-of-the-range 4-cylinder XLE starts at $25,535, almost $2,000 less than the 2011 price. The LE Hybrid, which now returns a combined federal fuel economy rating of 41 m.p.g., starts at $26,750. The most expensive model, the V6 XLE, barely nudges over $30,000. And those prices include two years of free maintenance.

Toyota managed to lower sticker prices in the midst of a redesign by postponing the expensive mechanical upgrades that define the competition: you’ll not find direct fuel injection, turbochargers or a diesel engine in the Camry lineup. The new Camry is much like the old Camry, its edges that much more fanatically buffed and chamfered in pursuit of frictionless competence.

I could fill the rest of this review simply enumerating all the places where Toyota added extra sound-deadening material. (But I won’t.) And certainly, the Camry’s stolid serenity implies that it must not be much of a stretch to transform the V-6 model into its Lexus-badged equivalent, the ES 350. But you know the news well is a bit dry when Toyota bothers to mention that “the V-6 features a new, lower oil viscosity.” My apologies if you just fell off your chair.

Perhaps the wildest change lies not under the hood, but in the dashboard, where Toyota offers its new Entune multimedia system. Entune connects your car to your smartphone, offering Bing, Pandora and other apps through the display screen.

I applaud the idea of integrating phones in such a way that they become less dangerous, but I have to wonder if a trick multimedia system is at odds with the demographic of Camry buyers. The segment of Camry drivers who confuse the gas pedal with the brake pedal — per the findings of the unintended acceleration investigation — may well assume that pressing the Apps button causes a tray of jalapeño poppers to slide out of the dashboard.

Entune apps are free for three years, after which Toyota figures it will charge $5 a month for apps and another $5 for data. I predict that in three years, there will be a lot of Entune-equipped Camrys with nonfunctional apps because the owners will resent paying a monthly service fee for programs that are free on their phones.

Toyota is so keen on apps that it has set up an iCamry Pandora station, which I sampled on my phone after the test drive. Based on that experience, it appears that Adele, whose silky laments dominate iCamry radio, is the musical equivalent of Toyota’s marquee sedan. Given that Adele had the top-selling album last year, I suppose she is sort of the Camry of pop music. I give Toyota credit — it stays on message.

If it seems as if I’m spending a lot of time contextualizing, that’s because there’s not a whole lot of news about the driving experience. The 178-horsepower 4-cylinder is reasonably smooth and certainly powerful enough to suit most customers. The chunky four-spoke leather-wrapped steering wheel feels good in your hands, and the updated dash materials look nice, although the integrated sewn-in-place rear head restraints are an obvious cost-cutting measure. As for all that work reducing the noise quotient, if you told me the Japanese-market Camry were named the Serenity CloudDriver 2.5, I’d believe you.

I didn’t sample the V-6, but at a gas station, a Camry driver at an adjacent pump called over and commented on the 4-cylinder XLE that I was fueling. He’d just bought a V-6 version, which he told me was exceedingly rapid. I was surprised — not that the 268-horsepower V-6 is fast, but that Camry drivers talk to one another.

I also sampled the Hybrid, which strikes me as the killer deal of the lineup. Toyota says the Camry Hybrid, with 200 combined gas-electric horsepower, does a 0-to-60 sprint in 7.6 seconds, making it faster than the conventional 4-cylinder while returning a fantastic 43 miles per gallon in the Environmental Protection Agency’s city cycle.

There’s even an E.V. mode, wherein the driver can rely on the nickel-metal-hydride batteries alone for as much as 1.6 miles. But you’ll need to really tiptoe through the country club to keep the gas engine from firing up, as I discovered when an injudicious throttle foot prompted the gauge cluster to scold me with the message, “E.V. mode deactivated: excessive acceleration.” Let’s just say that the Camry and I have differing ideas about what constitutes excessive acceleration.

Across the board, the 2012 Camry offers worthwhile improvements to its predecessor, especially with the price. But at some point Toyota might begin worrying that it’s been optimizing its propellers while everyone else is building jets.

The Fusion, for example, will offer lithium batteries for the new hybrids (one of them a plug-in), stop-start systems, direct injection and small-displacement turbocharged motors. None of these features is on the Camry’s horizon anytime soon.

Once upon a time, Honda and Toyota had an easy time dominating the midsize sedan market. The Americans were indifferent, the Koreans amateurish, the Germans too expensive. Now Ford and General Motors are going in guns ablaze with the Fusion and Malibu, Hyundai and Kia are raising their game with every redesign and Volkswagen has repositioned the Passat to go after the meat of the market. The Camry enjoys the momentum conferred by the best-seller title, but even disinterested car buyers will eventually punish year-to-year stasis. (See: mid-1990s Ford Taurus.)

The Camry’s historic excellence has forced Toyota’s competitors to go back to the drawing board and rethink their strategies. I suspect that sooner rather than later, Toyota will do the same.

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INSIDE TRACK: The incumbent champ fights to maintain momentum.