The Toyota Crown Is A Weird Car For Weirdos, But I’m A Weirdo So I Kinda Get It

Growing up, my best friend’s dad, I’ll call him Frank, was an actuary for a large human resources company. When I finally learned what an actuary was, I couldn’t imagine anyone else better suited to the job than Frank. This is a guy who played Sim City and kept detailed notes in a series of notebooks in order to optimize his city.

The family very generously took me to Disney World with them one year, and I got to watch my friend’s dad try to apply the principles of actuarial science to making it the most efficient trip. Does fun equate with efficiency? Not quite, though, in fairness to him, I spent very little time waiting in lines. The flipside of this is that we ate dinner at like 4:15 pm every day.

He was already relatively successful by the time I met him, and as a marker of that success, he bought himself a nice car. That this nice car was a first-generation Toyota Avalon fits with Frank’s whole so-normal-its-weird vibe.

The Avalon is gone, having essentially been replaced by the Toyota Crown. On paper, this is a sensible vehicle that offers a lot of features for only a near-luxury price. It’s build-sheet efficiency achieved in the strangest way possible, which is very Frank. It’s also a car that makes none of the normal choices, which makes it weird in a very me way.

It’s possible the Toyota Crown is the only vehicle that fits in the very narrow ellipse in the Venn Diagram of what he likes and what I like.

[Full disclosure: Toyota delivered this to me with a full tank of gas and a snow brush, which was nice.]

The Basics

Engine: 2.4-liter turbo inline-four hybrid with 61 kW front/58.6 kW rear motors

Transmission: Six-speed ‘direct shift’ eCVT

Drive: All-wheel drive

Output: 340 combined horsepower, 400.4 combined torque

Fuel Economy: 29 MPG city, 32 MPG highway, 30 MPG combined

Base Price: $54,990

Price As-Tested: $55,465 (including $1,135 shipping/handling)

Why Does This Car Exist?

This is an extraordinarily good question and one, realistically, no one will ever be able to give me a good answer for. Was the market clamoring for a successor to the AMC Eagle? Probably not. Is a tall, crossover-like vehicle that doesn’t look like a crossover or come with a hatch a proper replacement for the Camry-but-a-little-bigger Avalon? I don’t think so.

Here’s what Jason got out of Toyota when he went on the launch for the Crown back in 2023:

They did say that their target buyers would be “young empty nesters,” a group that I imagine is composed of people in their mid 30s who set their children free in the woods because fuck it, too much work. I find this kind of a strange demographic, because the car feels far too roomy and big for a couple with no kids. This could easily be a family car, if desired. But, somehow we’ve all decided as a culture that almost everything needs four doors, so with that in mind, sure, young, sexy empty-nesters it is.

I’m glad that Toyota gave it a try. There was once a time when the premium subcompact crossover wasn’t a thing, either, and Buick rebadged a South Korean GM product and basically created an extraordinarily popular segment. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and Toyota took a shot here.

How Does It Look?

Usually, this is the easy part of the job. Aesthetic judgment is primarily subjective, so there’s practically no way to give a truly wrong answer. The only incorrect judgment would be the absence of a judgment. Do I have a judgment? I am indecisive.

This is the non-two-tone version, and I think it looks good. Kind of? It is proportionally strange, and this strangeness is best revealed in profile, where the we-put-a-sedan-body-on-a-crossoverness of the Crown is most obvious. If you just look at the top of the car, there’s an attractive greenhouse (the DLO, as designers call it) that kinks at the C-pillar. The rear has that strange crease, which is very Lucid Air. The front looks relatively normal in profile.

It’s that space in between the front wheel arch and the hood, and the rear wheel arch and the aft-most window that’s odd. There’s just, like, more space there than should be. It’s so novel in anything that isn’t an AMC product that’s older than I am, I lack the crutch of comparison.

Head-on, I’m on board. It’s modern and sleek in a neo-Toyota sort of way. The rear is a bit busy, but I’m from Houston, so I like a big butt if it can keep a beat. The profile? Huh. I’m gonna need 2-3 months to form an opinion.

What’s It Like Inside?

For all of the chances the Crown takes on the outside, it’s drama-free on the inside. I think the last generation of Toyota interior design was both somehow a little bland and a little busy, and this resolves both by being handsome and clean.

Toyota adopts the basic split two-screen setup that has become the default for most Western automakers. The 12.3-inch touchscreen at the center features the company’s Toyota Audio Multimedia system, which works well enough, but I mostly just used CarPlay.

Credit, also, to Toyota for having an excellent and obvious layout for its steering wheel:

I don’t love the push-pull transmission selector, but I adapted to it rather quickly. What I didn’t adapt to is that I couldn’t find a button to release the trunk. I didn’t want to look it up and gave myself the challenge of locating it. It never happened, so I just had to use the remote:

How Does It Drive?

If this were a crossover, I’d probably be giving it a lot of Mazda-like praise. With 400 lb-ft of combined torque, much of which comes from electric motors, it scoots. The transmission is also a big differentiator here, as it does this with a bit more theater than your typical Toyota hybrid.

That’s because this is the HybridMax powertrain, which is more similar to what you find in the larger crossovers than a Prius. The combo of a MacPherson strut-type front suspension and multi-link rear with a stabilizer bar is also fairly common, although the HybridMax does get slightly larger diameter stabilizer bars.

Again, for a crossover, it handles quite well. In this trim, you’re getting the eAxle out back, so there’s always at least some power going back there, as opposed to the basic hybrid.

Sitting behind the steering wheel, the high seating position makes you feel like you’re driving a crossover, but the car’s center of gravity is a little lower. Also, it’s a sedan. Right? I think. I think it’s a sedan.

For a sedan, it also handles well, but at more than 4,300 pounds, it doesn’t feel like a car. It seems like Toyota is trying to counter this with a steering wheel that’s equally heavily boosted. It works, mostly, but on some twisty back roads in Connecticut, the Crown’s ability to stay between the lines came at the expense of feel and communication. The car did what I wanted it to, but it wasn’t much of a conversation.

That would probably work for Frank. It doesn’t work as well for me.

I guess Toyota looked at what Subaru was doing so successfully with the Outback and thought it should do the same, but in its own strange way.

I Like It, But I’d Probably Like It Better For About $9,000 Less

Frank is a math guy. His life has always been numbers. I’m more of an emotional guy. I am motivated by feelings. That part of me sees the HybridMax as the only one to get, even if my fully decked out version is an uncomfortable $56,600 delivered.

That includes the upcharge for Bronze Age paint, the leather-trimmed seats, and all the rest. It feels nice in the Crown, and yet, no one would see it as a showy or flashy car.

I did go on Toyota’s configurator and built a Toyota Crown Limited with the non-Max hybrid system, and it was only $47,570, even with the extra charge for Supersonic Red paint. That’s $9,000 less in a vehicle that gets 13 MPG better fuel economy in the city than the one I drove.

If I’m buying this, do I care if it’s slower? I don’t think I do. Toyota doesn’t break down Crown sales by powertrain, but it does break it down by bodystyle. The Crown Signia, which looks like a crossover, outsells the sedan by 2-to-1.

I’ll try to get the Signia version in the base hybrid to see if that’s maybe the one for me, although a strange part of me likes the sedan better because it doesn’t look like anything else you could buy.

As a postscript ot this, the next car Frank bought was a Lexus LX470. It’s not a vehicle I’d have bought new at the time, being too large and flashy for my high school tastes. Now? I’d rock one. Perhaps in time we’ll all look back on the Crown sedan the same way we do the AMC Eagle. Time makes weirdos of us all.

All photos Matt Hardigree