Toyota Avalon
Have you seen the TV commercials for the 2011 Toyota Avalon? A single specific 30-second spot sticks out. It's shot by way of a 1960's filter and features an old-fashioned voiceover, cheesy elevator music and an airline pilot driving the large Toyota sedan on a cloud with a pretty flight attendant from the passenger seat. It is like something the Mad Men crew would create, minus the misogyny.
Nowadays, quite a few automakers simplified the car buying approach by bundling alternatives in packages and spreading them across three or more distinct trim levels. The 2011 Toyota Avalon goes even simpler, offering just two trim levels along with a bare minimum of available possibilities. Toyota pulls this off by offering the most basic Avalon which has a metric ton of standard equipment along with a $32,000 base MSRP, although a Restricted model adds even far more and jumps to near luxury territory with a starting point of $35,485. Those costs are higher than competitors like the Ford Taurus or Buick LaCrosse, but the payoff is really a confusion-free ordering course of action. Go for a Restricted model like our tester and there is but 1 choice to choose: a $1,450 navigation system. That singular solution brings our tester's MSRP to $37,885 including delivery. There are plenty of available accessories from the dealer, but ordering from the factory couldn't be any simpler.
Simplicity appears to be the order in the day for the Avalon, especially when talking about the big sedan's freshly up to date sheetmetal. The Avalon was reshaped and restyled for 2011, but if your eye is untrained in the art of automaker refreshes, you possibly won't be able to distinguish a 2010 product from a 2011. The front fascia now features a wider grille and modern front projector beam headlights that give the Avalon's face far more visual pop than the outgoing unit. The rear is up to date with conservative yet stylish LED taillamps, a clear upgrade over the 2010 design. Toyota designers round out changes for 2011 with additional chrome all around, revised rocker panels and updated wheel packages. Did somebody say far more chrome? The sexagenarian inside us is tingling!
At first we wondered why Toyota would spend the dollars to update the Avalon without creating it look considerably different than last year's mannequin, but then we remembered the average Avalon owner is 64 years old. Consider your grandparents. At some point, their favorite music migrated to your oldies station. They like movies with slower plot lines. They keep in mind when folks wrote letters with a pen instead of a keyboard. At some point, all of us will begin resisting change in favor of your familiar, and that goes for our cars, too. So Toyota has up to date the Avalon to glimpse more upscale without having alienating people clients who have come to love the way this cushy sedan looks. It makes ideal sense, except the Avalon was never what you'd call a beautiful design, and that really hasn't changed for 2011.
Toyota continues the familiar-is-better theme inside the Avalon's spacious cabin. The interior style hasn't changed much compared for the outdoing mannequin, and high quality soft touch materials abound everywhere you glimpse and feel. Each Avalon comes common with leather seating surfaces, and our Classic Silver Limited tester arrived equipped with normal heated and cooled front seats that make sure one's posterior is of your proper temperature no matter the season. And adjusting the Avalon's interior temperature couldn't be less difficult, thanks to dual climate controls with temperature readouts which are at least an inch in height. It does not take bifocals to read people digits.
Overall interior volume sits at a spacious 107 cubic feet, and passengers relegated for the back seat are greeted with an impressive 40.9 inches of leg space. That's nearly three inches additional room than the larger Ford Taurus and 3.1 inches a lot more space than the second row of a long-wheelbase Lexus LS460. People passengers will also appreciate a cabin that luxury car levels of quiet, just like the commercial tells us. Trunk area is comparatively small for a large vehicle at 14.4 cubic feet, but Toyota's designers and engineers made space for a big trunk opening, making the obtainable room far additional usable.
So far, the Avalon has met our expectation of being a fine automobile for the 60-and-over set, and driving it feels precisely how we expected. In a word, smooth. Well, a lot more like.!!!. smoooooooth. We're thinking Toyota was looking to make a better Oldsmobile 98 since that's exactly what the Avalon feels like. On fresh blacktop, it rides how we imagine a Landspeeder rides on the sleek sands of Tatooine (too modern day a reference?)!!! We couldn't discover a pot hole large enough to upset the Avalon's MacPherson strut suspension with offset coil springs either, though we'd add that same suspension wasn't so accomplished when it came to curves.
The Avalon feels heavy and tall when thrown into a corner with anything approaching verve, a feeling that is amplified by the driver's seat lacking any manner of side bolstering. It is challenging to argue with the Avalon's neutered driving dynamics when we look at it through the eyes of its target buyer, but we're pretty certain that drivers regardless of age are less than thrilled with torque steer, along with the Avalon has more than its fair share. But going full throttle from a dead stop possibly isn't a recurring habit for most 64-year-olds.
The Avalon matches its compliant but clumsy suspension setup with a sleek and sufficiently powerful 3.5-liter V6. Its 268 horsepower and 248 pound-feet of torque motivate the Avalon effortlessly and quietly, with no signs of rough throttle or exhaustive effort. The Avalon's six-speed automatic is also a suitable match for the three.5-liter engine, with quite clean, almost imperceptible shifts. We managed 24.4 miles per gallon throughout our week using the Avalon, which is right smack in the middle with the Environmental Protection Agency's official rating 20 mpg city/29 mpg highway, and really solid for a vehicle from the Avalon's heft.
There's an old joke among soon-to-be extinct Mercury salespeople. When sizing up vehicle buyer's by age, there's the youthful 16-24 demographic, the influential 25-34 group, the meat and potatoes 35-49 family varieties, the peak earnings 50-64 group and finally, can I interest you in a Mercury Grand Marquis? Funny? Perhaps not, but damnit if it hasn't been true more than the previous 30 years. Thanks to modern day medicine, Americans are living longer than ever prior to, but the Grand Marquis is really a consensus number in the automotive death pool. Next think about that the Taurus, LaCrosse and Nissan Maxima are targeting (and getting) younger buyers, and all of a sudden it's extremely apparent there aren't a lot of non-luxury substantial sedans targeting the Medicare crowd.
To be honest, we weren't all that excited to drive a huge, cushy sedan all week, but the Avalon wasn't precisely built for us. We do not have to pull our pants up previous our nipples to figure that out, and we're guessing your parents and grandparents do not need to either. Whilst the rest of the auto industry focuses much of its research and development cash wooing younger buyers, the 2011 Toyota Avalon continues to attract the aging clients it generally has. And contemplating that this group of customers continues to grow by the day, other automakers need to notice that the Avalon alone offers a modern alternative designed specifically for them, and does so unapologetically. That's some thing we'll raise our scotch and sodas to in 30 years, but until then, we're happy to let Grandpa drive.
