Imagine that you were born in 1961. Just like George Clooney, Dennis Rodman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dan Marino, Barack Obama, and John Pearley Huffman, you lived through the Cold War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Grenada, the Disco Invasion, the War on Drugs, and Battle of the Network Stars. You’re older than the internet but too young to have comfortably joined AARP seven years ago. Facebook? Yeah, get it. Snapchat? A mystery. When Toyota introduced the Avalon back in 1994 you were 33, still a junior office drone, and that was a car aimed at old farts. Irrelevant. Now here comes the 2019-model-year, fifth-generation Avalon, and at 56 going on 57, you are the old fart. Ralph Macchio, born November 4, 1961, this is your Toyota.

Conceptually, the Avalon sedan is the same as it ever was. It’s a riff on the Camry, a slightly stretched and conservatively redecorated machine with most of the primo gadgets standard. And it’s built on the same assembly line as the Camry at Toyota’s massive plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. While it’s optimized for North American duty, a few Avalons will be exported to the Middle East, but otherwise it sticks around the NAFTA neighborhood.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

Like the all-new 2018 Camry, the 2019 Avalon is built around the TNGA component set that also underpins the current Prius and will be the base upon which Toyota will erect most of its new cars and crossovers. As ever, it’s a front-wheel-drive four-door with a V-6; there’s also a hybridized version available that uses a four-cylinder engine, but all-wheel drive isn’t on the table. In an era when traditional, near-luxury sedans from a nonluxury brand are out of fashion, this is a traditional, near-luxury sedan from a nonluxury brand.

The Avalon’s horsepower and curb-weight numbers don’t matter much. But the potential buyers’ 401(k) balances do.

The Battle Between Shape and Detail

As a piece of sculpture, the new Avalon is flat-out gorgeous. Designed at Toyota’s Calty studio—a leap across Ann Arbor, Michigan, from Car and Driver’s offices—it’s an inch lower than the outgoing Avalon with a 2.0-inch-longer wheelbase and shortened overhangs. The roofline is a single swoop from the noticeably lower cowl across to the trunk. In silhouette, the Avalon is a knockout.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

But it’s fighting against some overly aggressive detailing, most particularly at the grille which is, well, ridiculous. It seems to spread for acres and essentially obliterates any suggestion of a front bumper. There’s so much grille that most of it isn’t actually open to airflow but is blocked off for aerodynamic efficiency. Toyota says the “upper and lower grilles have been unified to express performance” and that “the front grille has been constructed from intersecting 3-D surfaces for a premium image.” Okay, that’s fine. But some form-follows-function restraint would have added dignity and confidence to those attributes.

Still, even with that grille there’s some good in the nose. All grades of Avalon feature slim, elegant LED lighting, with the XLE and XSE trim levels employing three lamp elements while the Limited and Touring models add LED daytime-running-light accents that define the car’s eyes. The lofty Limited and Touring also get adaptive cornering lights that point into turns. That’s important for those of us aware that our peripheral vision is getting fuzzy as we age. Which sucks.

The best thing about how the new Avalon looks is how it bucks against the prevailing crossover-SUV orthodoxy. There is nothing about this four-door that even slightly hints at a fifth door or off-road pretension. And after driving a couple dozen stultifying five-door things, it’s great to look at a real car again.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

Familiar Formula

The Avalon’s standard powerplant has always been a V-6, and since the 2005 model year that V-6 has been the 3.5-liter 2GR-FE. The new Avalon’s updated 2GR is called the 2GR-FKS, as previously deployed in the Tacoma pickup and several Lexus models. Augmented by Toyota’s D4-S system, which combines elements of both direct and port injection, the V-6 can run the Atkinson cycle, boasts a stout 11.8:1 compression ratio, and is rated at 301 horsepower. That’s a gain of 33 horses over the 2018 model’s 268.

That output is channeled into an eight-speed automatic transmission that makes last year’s six-speed seem sadly archaic. Sixth gear is a direct 1:1 ratio while seventh and eighth are overdrives, the top ratio being an ultra-long 0.67:1. In the short drive available to C/D at the press intro, we found manually triggered shifts were impressively quick and sure. But people who buy Avalons are more likely to leave the gear selector in D and let the computers do the shifting. Fortunately, these are smart computers that keep engine revs low at part throttle without much sensation of gear hunting.

The Avalon is a 195.9-inch-long sedan that Toyota says weighs in at between 3560 to 3715 pounds, depending on trim. It’s a safe bet that zero-to-60-mph times will fall in the six-second range, but come on, this isn’t a machine for testing physical limits. Toyota may have committed itself to producing a more performance-forward image for the Avalon with this generation, but its character is still comfort first.

That shows up in the chassis tuning as well. The front suspension is, no surprise, a pair of struts, while the rear rides on a multilink suspension conceptually similar to that used on other vehicles on the TNGA platform. Point this liner’s prow into a corner and it won’t do anything goony, but it’s not thrilled to be challenged, either. The cornering limits are modest. The Touring model features an Adaptive Variable Suspension (AVS) system that may prove to be more entertaining.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

Hybridizational

Our exposure to the Avalon hybrid was extremely limited. But the big news isn’t anything novel in its engineering, it’s that the system carries a mere $1000 premium over the conventional V-6 drivetrain. (The hybrid is available in XLE, XSE, and Limited trims.) And Toyota’s fuel-economy estimates—43 mpg in the city and 44 on the highway on the XLE with 43 across the board on XSE and Limited trims—are astonishing. With the V-6 Avalon estimated at 22 mpg in the city and 31 or 32 on the highway depending on trim, the math indicates this is a hybrid that could pay for itself, an enticing prospect for anyone worried about the long-term health of that 401(k) balance.

That said, the combined output of the hybrid’s 2.5-liter inline-four and dual electric motors is a modest 215 horsepower, up 15 ponies from the previous model. This is a drivetrain built for strolling, and that may be plenty for many buyers. Despite the addition of 204 nickel-metal-hydride battery cells under the rear seat, trunk room isn’t compromised compared with the conventional Avalon.

Inner Winner, Chicken Dinner

The Avalon’s 113.0-inch wheelbase is 1.8 inches longer than the Camry’s, but Toyota squeezes 2.3 inches of additional rear-seat legroom out of that stretch without compromising space in the front. This is a car with a going-to-church vibe, and a spacious rear seat is likely to matter here. Additional stretch-out room isn’t an option on the Camry.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

Befitting its maturity, the Avalon’s interior is more conservatively conceived and decorated than the Camry’s. The panel shapes are simpler, fewer design elements intersect with one another, and the materials used are more subdued. XSE and Touring models use aluminum trim throughout the interior, while Limited models go more traditional with nice-looking real wood trim.

No vehicle can afford to be left behind in the tech sweepstakes, and the Avalon centers most of its functions in a 9.0-inch touchscreen atop the center stack. The Toyota dam has burst and Apple CarPlay is finally on offer. Still missing, however, is Android Auto. Whatever the disagreement is between Toyota and Google, they ought to work things out because the one thing that’s obvious is that buyers crave cell-phone integration.

More exposure and more driving will reveal what features truly matter and which are mere frippery. But this is clearly a better Avalon that’s still quiet, is still unpretentious (grille excepted), and still has an easygoing personality.

View Photos The Manufacturer Car and Driver

The first step on the 2019 Avalon ladder comes at $36,395 for the basic XLE, with the top-rung Touring model at $43,095. That’s not cheap, but it’s reasonable in a world where it’s easy to spend more than $50,000 on a sparsely equipped German mid-size sedan.

Not Another Crossover

Mechanically, the V-6–powered Avalon isn’t all that much different from a lot of mainstream crossovers, such as Toyota’s own Highlander and its competitors like the Honda Pilot. And except for the lower center of gravity and seat position, the driving experience is very similar to that of those crossovers, too. But it’s not a crossover.

Fighting against conventional wisdom is almost a generational imperative for the late boomers and early Gen Xers who are aging into the Avalon’s market cohort. In a weird way, cars like the Avalon have become countercultural. A big sedan is now an alternative to the dreary sameness of so many crossovers. After all, those of us born in 1961 aren’t THAT old.



This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io