Part 1: The KIA Optima
Part 2: The Dodge Dart
The car you about to see is a cure for insomnia.
No seriously, try and look at this car and not fall asleep.
It's not that it's a bad car. In fact, it's a very good car, likely to be very reliable and one that possess good handling, a comfortable ride and a very well designed 4 cylinder engine that's supposed to get 25/35 mpg depending on driving conditions.
To drive, the Camry is nice. Everything about the Camry is nice actually. And that's part of the problem. It's just nice. There is nothing either spectacular, or especially memorable, about the Camry at all. I can't tell you that the ride was outstanding, or that the steering was crisp, or anything really. The Camry I drove might as well have been any other car, except that the seats were horribly uncomfortable for a person my size and the "sporty" part-time paddle gear box seemed out of place in a family sedan.
The Camry also suffers from a malady that affects all front-wheel drive cars, torque steer. Engineers try to get rid of it but they frequently fail. The problem is nothing wrong with the car, but just a problem with trying to force the front wheels to handle both the drive and the steering. The Camry also is plagued by the tendency of almost every auto manufacturer to assume that what the customer wants is a sports-like feel. In reality, most of us don't want that at all. What we want is a car that handles pot-holes well and which doesn't jar our spines every time we drive over one of Houston's pot-holes.
Besides random boredom, What ails the Camry is the problem with most sedans in this class. They're all trying to be something that they're not.
In Summary: Overall I liked the Camry. I think it's a little more expensive than other cars in the class but it's going to be backed by Toyota's reliability. It's a very nice car at a fair price that's going to get you from A to B. All that said, I didn't fall in love with the Camry because, while there was nothing about it that was bad, there was nothing about it that was really great either. That said, I wouldn't buy one because I kept feeling that, if I purchased one, I would ultimately end up looking at other cars in the class and thinking "I should have bought that." As with most cars, the Camry comes with a bunch of available options, including an electronic nanny, which can drive the price of the car way, way up. I drove an SE model that comes with plenty of standard features and a ton of available technology. Bluetooth is standard but, in that model, dual zone climate control is not an available option. To include that you have to move way up in price.
Why you might buy one: You want a nice car that doesn't stand out in a crowd, that is reliable, and honestly is something you don't have to think about all that often. If that's what you want in a car, if you view it as nothing more than a tool, there is no better car for you. Toyota's are endlessly reliable and their engineers do a good job of dampening, but not eliminating under steer. While the dealer did his level best to ensure I didn't hit many potholes on my test drive I was able to drive over a water grate, the Camry felt fine going over it. The ride though borders on hard because, as I've mentioned, Toyota is determined to add an element of sporty into it's cruising sedans.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10: The Camry gets points full points for engineering, handling and predicted reliability but only partial points for ride and style.
