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So I spent a long weekend out in North Carolina visiting some friends for a wedding, and a relative to see his new 6 month old baby girl. I had a new Toyota Camry as a rental car. Here are my thoughts:
- The car is a looker. Mine was in white, and it really accentuated the lines of the vehicle. This is the first good looking (barring the 86) Toyota in a long time, dare I say since the last Celica. The interior has an upscale feel to it. You won't mistake it for a Lexus, but the material quality was better than I was expecting for a base model.
- Climate controls were rather intuitive and do not make you take your eyes off the road. The radio is another matter entirely. I mostly gave up on trying to make it work and just listened to directions from my GPS.
- The gas pedal has only two positions: granny coming from Sunday church service & boy racer. Seriously, the car either accelerates at a snail's pace or goes like I'm flogging the daylights out of it. With all these new 8, 9, and 10-speed transmissions you'd think there could be some nice middle ground, or at least some selectable driving profiles.
- The car returned an impressive 33+ MPG over the entire time I drove it. I put on over 400 miles and still had a quarter tank of fuel left with a mix of city and highway driving.
- To achieve the high MPG, I'm relatively certain the car comes standard with low rolling resistance tires. I came through a downpour and the car began to hydroplane like crazy at anything above 50 mph.
- Handling isn't razor sharp, but not vague either. Again, I attribute some of this to the tires.
- Incredibly roomy trunk.
- Electronic gadgets: I never saw much of a reason for adaptive cruise control, but I really found its worth out here. In heavy traffic on 4+ lane highways, it really is nice to have it set to give the cars in front of you a decent gap. If someone cuts in, it adjusts automatically. When a lane is safe to merge into, or the traffic ahead speeds up, it automatically gets you back to the speed you want to be at. Frankly, I scoffed at it at first, but I really came to like it. It freed me up to pay more attention to the traffic around me, as well as the road signage and concentrate less on the distance between myself and the vehicles in front of me.
- However, as much as I enjoyed the adaptive cruise control, I found myself yelling and screaming at two other nannies: the lane departure warning and the emergency braking. The lane departure gives tons of false positives - especially when I was driving through a construction zone with some leftover lines still visible on the road. Incessant beeping. One time I actually felt I drifted out of my lane a bit to pick up a coffee cup - nada. As for the emergency braking, there was a moment where the car ahead of me slammed on the brakes, and I was instantly on the brakes too when I saw what was transpiring. Half a second after I slam on the brakes, the car starts screaming bloody murder and I had to take my eyes off the road to see what it was complaining about. It was telling me to brake. No shit - way ahead of you car. That infuriated me, because I felt that taking my eyes off the road to see what it was complaining about was tremendously unsafe.
All in all, not a bad car, but does have its faults. The 'nanny and tranny', so to speak, would easily prevent me from buying one unfortunately.
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Wow you're going to town! Right in the dumpster!!!
Marc - great report on the Camry. It’s a good car for those that need reliable transportation. But not something I’d be likely to buy. Out Outback has those nannies too and it is very irritating.
Marc - I agree that the Camry is a good looking car. I think it looks as good in the wild as it does in the commercials. I have adaptive cruise control on my 2017 Civic and I use it a lot. I have used it to control from over 60 to a stop on the expressway when it was blocked with traffic. I was ready to hit the brakes though if I thought it wasn't under control. I also have lane centering which I use as an aid. It just kind of helps to track in the lane but you still need to pay attention. NYS roads can screw it up though with the poor lane markings. On mine it just clicks off with a low audible beep when it is confused or meets certain speed levels and then comes back on when it can. My lane departure program doesn't beep (or yell at me). It does a shake of the wheel, but I don't get many false readings. Emergency braking is set on my car to only flash a warning and not any audible warning. This can be turned on and off as far as audible warnings under setting. Lane departure and emergency braking warning can be turned off on the dash like traction control.
I did a lot of controls work at my old job so I have a certain respect and interest in control automation, but every once in awhile you just have to turn that stuff all off, put the shift lever in sport, put your fingers on the paddle shifters and cut apexes across all those lane markers using the seat of your pants!
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that is Miami, east coast. Years back my father ,living on Fl east coast, used to use my old desktop builds. What I removed from his box was always covered in corrosion. What's going to happen with that car? Ouch
07-17-2018, 10:23 AM
