2011 Toyota Camry on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Toyota Camry re-earns CR 'Recommended' rating following crash tests

All is right again in the Toyota kingdom. The Japanese manufacturer's bread-and-butter sedan, the Camry, has been put back on Consumer Reports' "Recommended" vehicle list, following improved performance in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash testing.
You'll recall that the 2012 and 2013 Camry were infamously booted from the list due to "Poor" ratings in IIHS' notoriously tough small-overlap crash testing. Toyota vowed - just last week actually - to fix the ratings. As the Toyota brand's head, Bill Fay, said last week, "It's still a five-star car. It still does very well in all the IIHS tests. It did not in [the small overlap frontal crash test], and we're busy making the necessary adjustments so that we can address that."
Now, though, those redesigned cars have been tested, earning an "Acceptable" rating in the overlap testing. According to Consumer Reports, Camrys built from November 2013 on feature new internal structures that improve the car's crash test scores enough to make it a "Recommended" buy. IIHS has also elevated the car back to a position in its Top Safety Pick category, although it falls short of the new gold standard, the Top Safety Pick + rating.

Toyota promoting Mirai as if hydrogen tax credit never went away

At the end of December, the US federal government let the $8,000 tax credit for hydrogen-powered vehicles expire. Despite this little wrinkle, Toyota is still promoting the upcoming 2016 Mirai fuel cell vehicle as a car that will cost under $50,000. In some cases a lot less, since it may also qualify for a $5,000 incentive in California. The car has a $57,500 MSRP, but Nihar Patel, vice president of North American Business Strategy for Toyota Motor Sales, spoke at the 2015 Washington Auto Show last week, and said that the Mirai could cost $44,500 in California. You can see this in the video at around minute four. Toyota knows that the federal incentives have expired, since the real news from the show was Patel's public request to the federal government that the $8,000 tax credit be extended. "We think that the federal credit expiration last year puts [hydrogen] customers in a fairly disadvantageous postion," he said. Plug-in vehicle buyers can still get up to $7,500 tax credit and, "we believe that this inequity needs to be fixed," he said. You can see this in the video at minute 10:20. Toyota said including both the after-incentives price and the call to reinstate those incentives was intentional since it shows a discrepancy between hydrogen and plug-in vehicles in the eyes of the feds. We asked Toyota's director of Energy and Environmental Research, Technical and Regulatory Affairs, Robert Wimmer, for more details on Toyota's request. "[The Mirai] being a ZEV and battery electrics also being ZEVs, we just want to make the playing field as level as possible," he said, adding that any extension would last "for the run of the vehicle," which would be three years. He admitted that the extension might only be for one or two years, if it happens at all. (A Toyota spokesperson clarified to AutoblogGreen that the Mirai program will not end after three years.) And that's the problem. "The tax process is difficult to predict," he said. "The two challenges we have now are that both houses of Congress are Republican and also that there has been talk for a while about comprehensive tax reform. If that moves forward, then extenders would probably be put on the back burner as comprehensive tax reform is discussed." Wimmer would not reveal any details about how Toyota is pressuring the government to act, only saying that Toyota's has people lobbying up on Capitol Hill.

Toyota's refreshed Sai is a Lexus HS by any other name

Toyota first launched Lexus in the United States back in 1989, but it wasn't until 2005 that it brought the luxury marque home to roost. But don't think that Toyota didn't find a way of selling many of its premium models in the Japanese Domestic Market in the meantime. The Lexus LS was sold as the Toyota Celsion, the ES as the Vista and Camry Prominent, and the SC as the Soarer. (We could go on, but you get the point.)
These days Lexus sells in markets around the world, including Japan, but Toyota still spins off its own versions of Lexus models to sell domestically as well. Like the new Sai, for example. Sharing its platform, hybrid propulsion and much more with the Lexus HS (which you may remember as the world's first dedicated luxury hybrid until it was pulled from the market early last year), the Sai was introduced to Japan at the same time as the HS was rolled out around the world. Now nearly four years on the market, Toyota has given it a bit of a refresh.
Boasting a far more aggressive front end and a restyled rear, the revised Sai features LED headlights, 16-inch alloys and a higher-quality interior in which JDM buyers will find a new center console and trim, along with an optional 10-speaker infotainment system. Toyota also boasts that the new Sai is made of 20-percent Ecological Plastic and recycled resin.