The Experience of Driving a Camry - A Review of the 2023 Toyota Camry

Driving the Toyota Camry is an experience that will leave you with mixed emotions. On one hand, this car feels quick and responsive, especially when it comes to turning in and navigating tight corners. The all-wheel drive system provides excellent traction control, which helps pull the driver out of various driving situations. However, despite its impressive handling capabilities, the Camry is not a sports car. It's designed for everyday driving, and most drivers will find themselves comfortable behind the wheel.

One aspect that sets the Camry apart from other vehicles in its class is its transmission. The manual control system feels almost like an automatic to me, with shifts that take over when you're driving aggressively. While this may be convenient for many drivers, it can also make the car feel less responsive and less engaging to drive. I found myself wishing for a more traditional manual gearshift experience, but unfortunately, that's not something that Toyota has implemented in this particular model.

The ride quality of the Camry is another area where it falls short. While the steering is smooth and responsive, the suspension feels overly firm and choppy, making it uncomfortable to drive on rough pavement. This is particularly noticeable in areas with potholes or uneven road surfaces. The use of large wheels and tires does contribute to this issue, as they can make the ride feel more pronounced.

In terms of interior space and comfort, the Camry is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's designed to be comfortable for smaller drivers, with ample legroom and headroom in front of the driver. However, for taller or larger individuals, the cabin can feel claustrophobic due to its proportions. This may be a deal-breaker for some potential buyers.

The interior itself is well-appointed, with a range of amenities and features that cater to different driving styles and preferences. However, I couldn't help but notice that the materials and design elements feel somewhat generic and unremarkable, lacking the unique character that sets other vehicles apart from one another.

One issue that I did encounter during my test drive was an occasional problem with the transmission shifting into reverse or forward at unexpected times. This may be a software bug or a design quirk, but it's something that could potentially cause frustration and annoyance for drivers who aren't expecting it.

Overall, the Toyota Camry is a solid choice for those looking for a reliable and comfortable daily driver. However, its limitations in terms of ride quality, transmission responsiveness, and interior space may make it less appealing to some potential buyers. As with any vehicle, it's essential to weigh these factors against your individual needs and preferences before making a decision.

The Camry is a hatchback on stilts - designed for someone who doesn't want an SUV but wants the versatility of one without the bulk. This car may appeal to smaller, more petite drivers who prioritize comfort and practicality over raw performance or aggressive styling. However, larger or taller individuals may find themselves disappointed by the limited headroom and interior space.

In conclusion, driving a Toyota Camry is an experience that will leave you with mixed emotions. While it's quick, responsive, and comfortable in many ways, its limitations in terms of ride quality and transmission responsiveness may be a turn-off for some drivers. The Car's target demographic of petite females seems to love the interior and overall design - however this will depend on who's driving it.

The most negative part about this Camry is indeed its poor ride quality it doesn't handle all well as you can see steering is good but it feels like there's a bit of understeer when turning in and I think 99.9 percent of people are going to be disappointed by the ride - it's too firm even on smooth pavement.

One thing that sets the Camry apart from other vehicles in its class is its transmission behavior, which can feel almost automatic at times, particularly during aggressive driving. However, this can also make the car feel less responsive and engaging to drive.

A Car like this will only be acceptable if the transmission was responsive - motor always on oil- it's not a sports car so you'll have to accept that - the ride quality isn't that great even with sportier tuning which is a bit puzzling.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to a quick look at the 2017 Infiniti qx30 now the qx30 is Infinity's attempt at combining hatchbacks and Cu V's and the thing is Infiniti didn't want to make a huge investment in a platform like this so they leveraged a partnership with Mercedes so really underneath the skin we're looking at a Mercedes GLA now that's not a big deal because sometimes if you were to go and design a car yourself and make a new car from the ground up and you weren't sure that you could afford the investment or you didn't want to put that investment in that segment it makes sense to partner up with somebody else that already has one built so that's why this exists now really when you look at it it looks like a straight-up car on stilts now you can tell from the exterior here this is where Infiniti spent most of their own time Engineering they wanted fresh sheetmetal they wanted to restyle this over the Mercedes and I think for the most part it works now the problem when you try to get these aggressive looking vehicles is the wheel gap because it's so raised up the proportions seem strange to me and then you get to the front grille which looks very spindle like almost like the Lexus you may have noticed that shop e2 is under construction so we're going to take a look at the underneath of the qx30 before we take a quick dry now that we had the qx30 on the Ben pack lift you might be wondering where Scott is was he fired no he wasn't fired he was busy getting an ear lavage so he can't be with us today or with me rather and we're under construction so this is strange anyway but under the qx30 it's pretty simple for the most part you don't have a ton of panels covering up the underbody of this car that is because they probably want to keep air flow for this turbo setup the second thing is even though they have aluminum lower control arms aluminum knuckles but this is a strut based suspension this is not double wishbone this looks more like a balance between what you find in a regular CUV and kind of an upscale piece and when you look at the middle of this car you realize this is all wheel drive this has the all-wheel-drive option and I said this about the cx-3 I wouldn't buy it without it because this makes very little sense as a front-wheel drive vehicle it this is what gives you the utility now the middle part of the car has these asphalt or composite covers along the side there's not a ton of Aero here give your exhaust and then the drive shaft is actually hidden above the heat shield and it runs above here to the back differential in the back we have a multi-link suspension one that uses aluminum lower control arms an aluminum hub and then you pretty much have stamped steel everything else now one of the things you'll see here is that they use a separated coil spring from the damper and a lot of the reason they did this is to be able to lower the load floor in the rear for more cargo capacity now this car does not have electronic or adjustable dampers and that's one of the things they can get this price point it based on my driving experience that it could absolutely use to give it a better personality on the road but over the you know really there's not a lot to go over right here most of the people that are looking at this are not going to care too much about the underbody section of this car you have the typical German on-demand all-wheel drive system this is just a lot of what we see over and over again in this segment of Cu V's now that I've gotten my hands dirty with the qx30 it's time to take this thing for a drive and see if it's going to wet my whistle the Infiniti qx30 this is going to be a different type of drive because I'm loaded full of Ikea items lattes dolls feminine hygiene products and Muscle Milk or you know protein shakes so let's take a look at this car in a straight line start off okay first thing you're going to know notice about it is these new floor popper turbos they're designed for efficiency but they want to give you the torque of the v6 now almost every single floor popper turbo except for some of the sports cars out there they sound horrible they sound like vacuum cleaners so what do and what can engineers do besides well they can put on crazy exhaust which is too loud for most people you can do weird intake tuning which you know doesn't do much but now the new trend is digital engine noise it sounds like a synthesizer through your speakers to kind of augment the motor and in the qx30 that's what they're doing and it sounds very fake all the time the second thing to talk about with the qx30 is well obviously it's a Mercedes underneath we're not they're not fooling anybody here but at the same time there's some things that I've noticed driving it more that one is it's extremely quiet and very solid feeling when you're driving I think I don't remember the level I mean there's been some cars but this one is definitely one of the top four I'm always speeding in it I get zero sense of speed I'm looking down on the highway and I'm going 70 miles an hour and flake absolutely nothing and that's a huge Pro for somebody that wants kind of a a little bit of a disconnect or you know just wants to be removed from the road environment or AMA we're going to go into these turns here with all this crap flying around all night in Camden you can't disable traction control stability control until we've gone here but the good thing is the best thing about this car is experienced by is clearly quick 3 at the turn in in fact this is all-wheel drive and the all-wheel drive pull do lava pulled you out of a lot of nonsense it doesn't understeer as much oh oh my camp but they're still under steered this is not a sport sporty car it's not a sports car and I think 99.9% of people that are driving this are going to be absolutely putting it around the one thing that I'm not doing it all is I stopped using the manual control company automatic transmission despite this being a dual clutch despite this being a dual-clutch well it just it feels like a tour convert an automatic to me and regular driving it's really quick to ship but when you're doing more aggressive driving it's not as fast as you would expect manual controls almost just a joke it just takes over and Auto up shifts it's not responsive to down shifting so just keep it in Drive and that's just kind of the best experience you're going to get now the shift behavior does have some issues that I found when I first got this car I would go into reverse and start going at a pretty decent clip I mean not fast but not you know I'm not putting and the car wanted to stall on me a couple of times same thing when I was going forward I put it in reverse code to try come up to a stop sign and there's a lot of time where it's like intensity where it wants to stall and it to me if I'm having that problem chances are other people are too and it again it could be a transmission programs bug or just an ECU bug in the for the engine programming now the meat and potatoes of the qx30 is this is a hatchback on stilts it's for somebody that doesn't want a car doesn't want hatchback they want to see you the SUV but they don't want a big SUV or CUV and that's kind of where this fits in I think in all honesty I think this is probably designed for the female demographic somebody of a smaller body type that is shorter is going to feel really comfortable in this car somebody that is larger taller wider especially taller it's going to feel claustrophobic it's not a lot of headroom and a lot of that has to do with that's here just just the overall interior proportions feel more like a compact car and then a larger car anything it's going to it's going to be great for some and really bad for others now the most negative part about this qx30 is its ride quality it's not that it doesn't handle all the steering's good all that stuff but I feel like the ride is way too choppy it feels very over dampen and when you get on rough pavement specifically this thing just it's just way too hard easily what you get in the backseat I don't know how they just carry it over some of the European tuning of the suspension it didn't change it much for this model but it's too firm in the bad roads in the Midwest where I am and it gets really annoying really fast here not a hazy but smooth pavement now for a car like this there's something you have to say about that if the transmission was responsive the motor was you know always on oil and it was more of a sporty experience all the time I could totally accept a rough ride but this is not that car so having a firm having a firm suspension doesn't do it for me I think a lot of people are gonna notice that and one of the things too is you have big wheels big tires in here and when you have smaller side walls or more car-like sidewalls like this it's going to affect the ride quality had almost been curious to see what o7 like wicker tires or smaller wheels and tires would do for this oh man my latte better not slip over the conclusion of the qx30 I know this is a quick review for Matt and we'll be back to normal action next week I promise this vehicle is confusing and I say that a lot about Seavey's and crossovers and hatchbacks sometimes in the modern age of vehicles this is a car CUV that I think is going to have pretty limited appeal overall mostly because of its size but I'll be curious to see how many they sell in the demographics of this car of who's buying it because I've had I've had some people in here that really love this car they love the interior they love all of that so we'll just see at the price point if it's going to pull people away from more mainstream crossover hatchbackswelcome to a quick look at the 2017 Infiniti qx30 now the qx30 is Infinity's attempt at combining hatchbacks and Cu V's and the thing is Infiniti didn't want to make a huge investment in a platform like this so they leveraged a partnership with Mercedes so really underneath the skin we're looking at a Mercedes GLA now that's not a big deal because sometimes if you were to go and design a car yourself and make a new car from the ground up and you weren't sure that you could afford the investment or you didn't want to put that investment in that segment it makes sense to partner up with somebody else that already has one built so that's why this exists now really when you look at it it looks like a straight-up car on stilts now you can tell from the exterior here this is where Infiniti spent most of their own time Engineering they wanted fresh sheetmetal they wanted to restyle this over the Mercedes and I think for the most part it works now the problem when you try to get these aggressive looking vehicles is the wheel gap because it's so raised up the proportions seem strange to me and then you get to the front grille which looks very spindle like almost like the Lexus you may have noticed that shop e2 is under construction so we're going to take a look at the underneath of the qx30 before we take a quick dry now that we had the qx30 on the Ben pack lift you might be wondering where Scott is was he fired no he wasn't fired he was busy getting an ear lavage so he can't be with us today or with me rather and we're under construction so this is strange anyway but under the qx30 it's pretty simple for the most part you don't have a ton of panels covering up the underbody of this car that is because they probably want to keep air flow for this turbo setup the second thing is even though they have aluminum lower control arms aluminum knuckles but this is a strut based suspension this is not double wishbone this looks more like a balance between what you find in a regular CUV and kind of an upscale piece and when you look at the middle of this car you realize this is all wheel drive this has the all-wheel-drive option and I said this about the cx-3 I wouldn't buy it without it because this makes very little sense as a front-wheel drive vehicle it this is what gives you the utility now the middle part of the car has these asphalt or composite covers along the side there's not a ton of Aero here give your exhaust and then the drive shaft is actually hidden above the heat shield and it runs above here to the back differential in the back we have a multi-link suspension one that uses aluminum lower control arms an aluminum hub and then you pretty much have stamped steel everything else now one of the things you'll see here is that they use a separated coil spring from the damper and a lot of the reason they did this is to be able to lower the load floor in the rear for more cargo capacity now this car does not have electronic or adjustable dampers and that's one of the things they can get this price point it based on my driving experience that it could absolutely use to give it a better personality on the road but over the you know really there's not a lot to go over right here most of the people that are looking at this are not going to care too much about the underbody section of this car you have the typical German on-demand all-wheel drive system this is just a lot of what we see over and over again in this segment of Cu V's now that I've gotten my hands dirty with the qx30 it's time to take this thing for a drive and see if it's going to wet my whistle the Infiniti qx30 this is going to be a different type of drive because I'm loaded full of Ikea items lattes dolls feminine hygiene products and Muscle Milk or you know protein shakes so let's take a look at this car in a straight line start off okay first thing you're going to know notice about it is these new floor popper turbos they're designed for efficiency but they want to give you the torque of the v6 now almost every single floor popper turbo except for some of the sports cars out there they sound horrible they sound like vacuum cleaners so what do and what can engineers do besides well they can put on crazy exhaust which is too loud for most people you can do weird intake tuning which you know doesn't do much but now the new trend is digital engine noise it sounds like a synthesizer through your speakers to kind of augment the motor and in the qx30 that's what they're doing and it sounds very fake all the time the second thing to talk about with the qx30 is well obviously it's a Mercedes underneath we're not they're not fooling anybody here but at the same time there's some things that I've noticed driving it more that one is it's extremely quiet and very solid feeling when you're driving I think I don't remember the level I mean there's been some cars but this one is definitely one of the top four I'm always speeding in it I get zero sense of speed I'm looking down on the highway and I'm going 70 miles an hour and flake absolutely nothing and that's a huge Pro for somebody that wants kind of a a little bit of a disconnect or you know just wants to be removed from the road environment or AMA we're going to go into these turns here with all this crap flying around all night in Camden you can't disable traction control stability control until we've gone here but the good thing is the best thing about this car is experienced by is clearly quick 3 at the turn in in fact this is all-wheel drive and the all-wheel drive pull do lava pulled you out of a lot of nonsense it doesn't understeer as much oh oh my camp but they're still under steered this is not a sport sporty car it's not a sports car and I think 99.9% of people that are driving this are going to be absolutely putting it around the one thing that I'm not doing it all is I stopped using the manual control company automatic transmission despite this being a dual clutch despite this being a dual-clutch well it just it feels like a tour convert an automatic to me and regular driving it's really quick to ship but when you're doing more aggressive driving it's not as fast as you would expect manual controls almost just a joke it just takes over and Auto up shifts it's not responsive to down shifting so just keep it in Drive and that's just kind of the best experience you're going to get now the shift behavior does have some issues that I found when I first got this car I would go into reverse and start going at a pretty decent clip I mean not fast but not you know I'm not putting and the car wanted to stall on me a couple of times same thing when I was going forward I put it in reverse code to try come up to a stop sign and there's a lot of time where it's like intensity where it wants to stall and it to me if I'm having that problem chances are other people are too and it again it could be a transmission programs bug or just an ECU bug in the for the engine programming now the meat and potatoes of the qx30 is this is a hatchback on stilts it's for somebody that doesn't want a car doesn't want hatchback they want to see you the SUV but they don't want a big SUV or CUV and that's kind of where this fits in I think in all honesty I think this is probably designed for the female demographic somebody of a smaller body type that is shorter is going to feel really comfortable in this car somebody that is larger taller wider especially taller it's going to feel claustrophobic it's not a lot of headroom and a lot of that has to do with that's here just just the overall interior proportions feel more like a compact car and then a larger car anything it's going to it's going to be great for some and really bad for others now the most negative part about this qx30 is its ride quality it's not that it doesn't handle all the steering's good all that stuff but I feel like the ride is way too choppy it feels very over dampen and when you get on rough pavement specifically this thing just it's just way too hard easily what you get in the backseat I don't know how they just carry it over some of the European tuning of the suspension it didn't change it much for this model but it's too firm in the bad roads in the Midwest where I am and it gets really annoying really fast here not a hazy but smooth pavement now for a car like this there's something you have to say about that if the transmission was responsive the motor was you know always on oil and it was more of a sporty experience all the time I could totally accept a rough ride but this is not that car so having a firm having a firm suspension doesn't do it for me I think a lot of people are gonna notice that and one of the things too is you have big wheels big tires in here and when you have smaller side walls or more car-like sidewalls like this it's going to affect the ride quality had almost been curious to see what o7 like wicker tires or smaller wheels and tires would do for this oh man my latte better not slip over the conclusion of the qx30 I know this is a quick review for Matt and we'll be back to normal action next week I promise this vehicle is confusing and I say that a lot about Seavey's and crossovers and hatchbacks sometimes in the modern age of vehicles this is a car CUV that I think is going to have pretty limited appeal overall mostly because of its size but I'll be curious to see how many they sell in the demographics of this car of who's buying it because I've had I've had some people in here that really love this car they love the interior they love all of that so we'll just see at the price point if it's going to pull people away from more mainstream crossover hatchbacks\n"